A longtime Santa Clara Valley Water District manager has sued the agency and its former CEO, alleging Rick Callender denied her a promotion in retaliation for a sexual harassment complaint she filed against him years earlier — a connection the district’s outside investigators found was more likely than not.
A lawsuit filed Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court alleged Callender “acted with oppression, fraud, malice and in conscious disregard” of the rights of Jessica Collins, a business planning and analysis unit manager who has worked at the water district since 2006. It also alleged that “Valley Water failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent discrimination in its workplace.”
On Wednesday, Callender denied any wrongdoing.
“These allegations are categorically false, baseless, and a reckless attempt to damage my reputation,” he said in a statement. “I welcome the opportunity to present the facts, defend my name, and prevail in court.”
Based in San Jose, the district is one of the largest government agencies in Santa Clara County. It provides flood protection and drinking water to 2 million people in Santa Clara County, and employs roughly 800 people.
Valley Water CEO Rick Callender speaks during a groundbreaking ceremony for the Anderson Dam Seismic Retrofit Project in Morgan Hill, Calif., on Wednesday, July 7, 2021. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Callender, who had been CEO of the district, commonly known as Valley Water, since 2020 and who currently serves as president of the California-Hawaii NAACP State Conference, announced Feb. 20 that he would leave his $520,000-a-year post on March 1. He had been on paid administrative leave since December 2024, when allegations first surfaced that he had acted improperly toward multiple female staff members.
A 10-month investigation by an outside law firm that the district’s board hired concluded that Callender sexually harassed two female employees over multiple years, including sending inappropriate photos, making comments about his own sexual or romantic activities, and pressuring them for after-hours activities, including coming to his house to water his plants and attending Sharks games with him.
Collins filed a sexual harassment claim against Callender in 2008, when he worked in the communications and government relations departments of the water district. That complaint “was more likely than not a substantial motive in Callender’s decision not to hire” her in 2022 when he was CEO and she applied for a higher-ranking position in the agency, assistant officer at the Office of Integrated Water Management, the investigation concluded.
The investigation found that Callender had changed the members of a panel interviewing Collins for that job to include himself, a move the investigators called “an obvious conflict of interest.”
As part of a separation agreement with Callender, the district’s board, which is elected to four-year terms, drew widespread criticism from its staff members and employee unions after it agreed to continue to pay him his $512,866 annual salary plus $7,200 yearly car allowance and other benefits for another year until March 1, 2027, while he worked as a “special advisor” to board chair Tony Estremera with no defined work requirements, hours or deliverables.
Estremera told employees at a staff meeting days afterward that the agreement, in which Callender agreed not to sue the agency, was a way to reduce liability and ultimately save costs.
On Wednesday, Estremera said he couldn’t comment about the details of Collins’ lawsuit.
“We’ve been trying to settle these claims for a while,” he said. “We are going to continue to work on settling them. We are devoted to settling them. Personnel cases are not easy cases to settle. That’s the most I can tell you.”
Estremera said the district’s board has been interviewing candidates for the CEO position, along with a panel of employees and community leaders. While interim CEO Melanie Richardson is running the agency now, he said there are four finalists for the job, and the new CEO will be announced in about two weeks.
Collins’ lawsuit alleges sexual harassment, but does not specify where and when it happened or any details. The complaint notes only “The harassment was a continuing course of conduct. Related acts occurred over time.”
Collins filed a lawsuit in 2009 against Callender. But she dropped the case a year later. Following a public records request by the Mercury News, district officials said they have no record of paying any settlement in the case.
Collins’ attorney, Jocelyn Burton, of Oakland, did not return calls Wednesday asking why Collins dropped the 2009 lawsuit or whether she was alleging new sexual harassment since then.
The lawsuit states that after Collins filed an internal complaint with the district in 2008, it was investigated by the agency’s Equal Opportunity Programs Unit. She was notified by the unit’s director, Debra Dake, that many of her allegations had been sustained, including that Callender had engaged in unwelcome advances, called her on her cell phone after hours, invited her for drinks and on trips, and made intrusive inquiries into her personal life. After she rebuffed him, the lawsuit notes, “Callender became overly critical of her work” and “insinuated that he could be instrumental in her career advancement.”
At a board meeting in March, Dake said that HR officials recommended after the 2008 allegations that Callender be fired, but then-CEO Olga Martin Steele decided against it.
In 2020, the board voted 4-3 to make Callender the CEO. In that vote, all the male directors, Estremera, Dick Santos, John Varela, and Gary Kremen, voted for Callender, while the female directors, Nai Hsueh, Linda Lezotte and Barbara Keegan supported other candidates, including Felicia Marcus, who is the former chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board and former regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The men on the board who gave Mr. Callender a green light to continue his behavior when you handed him the position of the CEO, knowing full good and well that the allegations had been sustained and we had recommended termination 18 years ago, the behavior from that point forward rests with you,” Dake said in March. “It is beyond blame. It is nothing short of shameful.”
The district, Collins’ lawsuit said, is guilty of “failing to adopt appropriate discipline designed to stop the sexual harassment and in rewarding known sexual harassers.”