Brentwood School asks appeals court to toss out a judge’s ruling voiding its lease of veteran land

In a move that has alarmed veterans, Brentwood School is asking an appeals court to toss out a judge’s order voiding its lease for the land where it maintains extensive athletic facilities.

Attorneys for the elite private school filed a brief with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that District Court Judge David O. Carter misinterpreted the law in his final judgment voiding the remainder of a 10-year lease for over 22 acres of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ West Los Angeles campus.

A spokesman for veterans who are suing the VA over use of the land said they feel blindsided after negotiating a settlement with the school that would allow it to remain on the land while expanding veterans’ access to the athletic facilities and providing additional rent and services.

“They are absolutely furious,” said Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran who testified in the trial on the struggles of veterans seeking housing and advocates for them.

In a statement, the school downplayed the wording of the brief and reaffirmed its commitment to the agreement.

“Ultimately, we want to preserve Brentwood School’s valuable and long-standing relationship with Veterans, continue to provide them with extensive services, secure a legally valid lease for the use of Veteran land, and serve our students,” the statement said. “The school already has implemented significant additional services under the terms of the settlement agreement, even though the agreement has not received final approval.”

The school’s board chairman, Adam Cohn, acknowledged that the legal filing should have made that point.

“One of the things we could have done in the brief was make it clearer that we had a deal with the plaintiffs that we support,” Cohn said in an interview. “That is as true today as it was when we signed the document.”

But Reynolds said the veterans are skeptical.

“They can make public statements. That means absolutely nothing,” he said. “What means everything is what they wrote in that brief.”

Carter found that the Brentwood lease as well as those for UCLA’s baseball stadium, parking lots and an oil well operation failed to meet the legal requirement to “principally” or “predominantly” benefit veterans and their families.

After the VA appealed Carter’s ruling late last year, school attorney Jonathan Sandler told the court the school stood behind the settlement agreement it had negotiated with the veterans.

But his Jan. 17 brief to the appeals court made no mention of the agreement and instead argued that the West Los Angeles Leasing Act of 2016, the law on which Carter’s ruling rested, only required lease holders to provide services that principally benefit veterans and their families, not that the lease in its entirety had to meet that standard.

Sandler enumerated services the school provides, in addition to $850,000 in rent, including vocational training, physical recreation, transportation, scholarships for the children of veterans and hundreds of free meals.

If the lease in its entirety had to be for the sole purpose of benefiting veterans, “there would be no incentive for third-parties that are not exclusively veteran focused — including those parties that would provide extensive services to veterans — to enter into a lease on the WLA Campus,” he wrote.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022 by 14 veterans and since made a class action, challenged the leases and asserted an unmet need for permanent housing on the campus. Following an August trial, Carter issued a ruling that the leases were invalid and ordered the VA to produce 750 temporary and 1,800 permanent housing units on the campus.

Before issuing final judgment, he held a series of hearings and visits to the campus to identify specific parcels where the housing could be built and urged the leaseholders, though they were not named defendants in the case, to negotiate with the veterans on new lease terms. At one point he threatened to fill Brentwood School’s 10-lane swimming pool with sand if it did not comply.

Heeding the threat, the school reached a settlement with the veterans that would have increased its rent to $1 million, with cost-of-living increases, required several payments totaling $5 million and expanded the hours veterans could use its athletic facilities. But the VA’s attorneys, who maintained throughout the proceeding that the judge’s interpretation of the law was in error, objected and appealed the judgment.

Despite the appeal, Sandler asserted the school’s steadfast support of the proposed settlement.

“Brentwood is going to move forward right now as if the settlement is going to go forward and be approved by this court,” Sandler said. “... That is our hope, that is our plan, that’s what we want. We think it’s in the best interest of the veterans and of the school.”

But a few days later, the 9th Circuit issued a temporary stay of Carter’s order and set an expedited hearing for a date to be set in April. Saying the stay jeopardized the settlement agreement and left the school with no lease, Sandler asked Carter to let the school intervene.

At the time, veterans’ attorney Roman Silberfeld raised no objection, and Carter acceded. Silberfeld said he now regrets not objecting.

“My expectation was by not opposing their intervention, they were going to take steps to protect the settlement, not destroy it,” Silberfeld said in an interview. “They could write a brief that supported the settlement.”

Instead, Silberfeld said, “they have taken the position that judge Carter was wrong on virtually every aspect of every ruling he made.”

Sandler’s brief also contested Carter’s ruling that the 1888 gift of the land to the government created a charitable trust that imposes a fiduciary duty on the VA to create and maintain permanent housing for veterans on the campus and that the lease breached that duty.

Silberfeld called the school’s arguments meritless. The plaintiffs are required to file their brief by Feb. 17.