Watchdog:

A representative of an open-government group is threatening to sue the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau if it doesn’t release the terms of a legal settlement over its Surf City USA trademark.

Rich McKee, president emeritus of Californians Aware, said the bureau has an obligation as a public entity to release the terms of its agreement with the owners of Noland’s on the Wharf and Shoreline Surf Shop in Santa Cruz following the trademark lawsuit. But bureau officials say they can’t, trapped by a confidentiality agreement and a judge’s order.

McKee said that argument didn’t hold water because agencies with a public role like the bureau have to release the end results of any lawsuit. He’s waiting for the results of a court hearing later this month the bureau asked for to clarify their obligations; if it doesn’t get the settlement unsealed, his lawyers are ready to sue the next day, he said.

The bureau did everything it could to satisfy McKee’s requests, president Shirley Dettloff said. It asked the courts, it asked its lawyers, and it even tried to ask the Santa Cruz business it settled with, she said.

“We’ve said we want to be able to share from the very first letter we received at the bureau,” she said. “We said, ‘This is a court matter, and we’ll certainly try our best to make sure it’s available to you.’ But we’ve been put in a difficult position.”

McKee thinks the bureau agreed to more secrecy than the law allowed it, and any court hearing will leave them between “a rock and a hard place” with their contract and the law.

“Federal court magistrates have no interest in sealing these records,” he said. “They simply keep confidential the settlement negotiations themselves. What can’t be kept confidential is the agreement itself that involves a public agency.”

Dettloff, who sat in on the settlement negotiations, said bureau officials didn’t ask for confidentiality, though she said she wasn’t sure if the bureau’s lawyer might have agreed to it as matter of course.

“We certainly did not,” she said. “We’ve really bent over backward. Our hands are tied but he’s trying to make this an issue, blowing it out of proportion.”