A freshly-emboldened Orange County Board of Education once again took aim at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ongoing COVID-19 powers, filing new legal action Wednesday to end the statewide state of emergency.

Board members, along with a national organization that opposes vaccine mandates, filed an amended motion to a November lawsuit in an attempt to require Newsom to terminate the statewide state of emergency he enacted in March 2020.

“This is not about masks or vaccines; it is about giving California back to Californians and getting back to government and business as usual,” Mari Barke, a board member, said in an e-mail Wednesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, two judges recently ruled that Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified can’t impose their own COVID vaccine mandates. On Tuesday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff ruled that Los Angeles Unified cannot require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to attend classes.

The Orange County board’s motion for a preliminary injunction comes on the same day three of its members — Barke, Tim Shaw, and Lisa Sparks — were sworn in following their re-election wins on June 7. The conservative board previously sued Newsom while repeatedly voicing opposition to pandemic-related mandates in schools.

The ongoing state of emergency, the lawsuit alleged, has led to local government officials (including OCBE members) to lose local control over their own affairs to “unelected bureaucrats in Sacramento.” Conditions of “extreme peril” have ended, and a state of emergency “cannot be indefinite,” the lawsuit said.

“This is not a trivial matter,” according to the latest amended complaint. “The COVID-19 state of emergency is not like previous emergency proclamations that dealt with wildfires and droughts. It has been used to issue unprecedented restrictions on freedom, from business and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates.”

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The lawsuit was filed by the Orange County Board of Education, the Children’s Health Defense, and its California chapter, an organization founded by attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promoted discredited ideas about vaccines.

The governor’s office could not be reached for comment late Wednesday. Newsom is currently on vacation with his family in Montana.

The lawsuit marks the third legal action the OCBE has taken against Newsom since the beginning of the pandemic. In two earlier petitions, attorneys for the board took the unusual route of going directly to the State Supreme Court, which denied the most recent petition in August 2021. That prompted the board’s attorneys to file a lawsuit against Newsom, this time in Orange County Superior Court. A hearing is expected on Aug. 11.

Barke said this lawsuit is being handled pro-bono and not costing taxpayers any money. Other lawsuits the board has filed in recent years have cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

In other actions Wednesday, the four-member board selected who will represent them as chair and vice-chair: They unanimously picked Sparks and Shaw, respectively.

The board recently lost its sole dissenting voice when Trustee Beckie Gomez stepped down from the dais to avoid a lawsuit from Mike Tardif, a Republican candidate for the 68th Assembly District who said that Gomez serving on both the Tustin City Council and the Orange County Board of Education represented a conflict of interest.

Staff writer Sean Emery contributed to this report.

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