COTATI — A federal civil rights lawsuit was filed Tuesday against the City of Cotati in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, according to court records — the third such case filed against the small Sonoma County city by a plaintiff named George Barich in the past decade.
The case, Barich v. Cotati, was opened on the court’s electronic docket Tuesday morning and assigned case number 3:26-cv-04944. Plaintiffs George Edward Barich and Damien O’Bid are represented by attorneys Carleton L. Briggs and John Houston Scott of the Scott Law Firm in San Francisco, a firm long associated with civil rights litigation in the Bay Area.
The complaint invokes 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights statute that allows private parties to sue local governments and their officials for alleged violations of constitutional rights. The docket lists the cause of action as “42:1983 Civil Rights Act” and categorizes the nature of suit as “440 Civil Rights: Other.” Plaintiffs have demanded a jury trial.
Magistrate Judge Kandis A. Westmore has been assigned to the case. Under the Northern District’s standing procedures, a newly opened civil matter is routinely assigned to a magistrate judge, and the parties are then asked whether they consent to having the magistrate preside over the entire case. If either side declines, the matter is reassigned to a district judge.
The 81-page complaint itself was not yet publicly available through the court’s free public records portal as of Tuesday afternoon, and the specific factual allegations had not been published. The City of Cotati had not publicly responded to the suit as of publication, and it was not clear from the docket whether the city had yet been formally served with the complaint and summons.
The Scott Law Firm, founded by John Houston Scott, has handled a long list of civil rights and police-misconduct cases in Northern California. The presence of that firm — and of co-counsel Carleton L. Briggs — on an 81-page §1983 complaint suggests a substantive case, rather than a routine pro se grievance.
Tuesday’s filing is the third time a plaintiff named George Barich has sued the City of Cotati in federal court in roughly ten years. Court records show prior actions filed in January 2015 (case number 3:15-cv-00350) and January 2021 (case number 3:21-cv-00034), both in the same Northern District. The dispositions of those earlier matters, and the extent to which the new complaint revisits or builds on the earlier disputes, could not be determined Tuesday from the docket summaries alone.
Cotati, located on Highway 101 between Rohnert Park and Petaluma, has been a recurring venue for First Amendment, public-records and code-enforcement disputes over the years. The city operates under a council-manager form of government, with day-to-day legal matters handled by a contract city attorney.
The Memorial Day holiday weekend may explain in part why no other Sonoma County news outlet had picked up the filing by midafternoon Tuesday. The case appeared on CourtListener’s public docket feed but had not, as of this writing, been picked up on any local news wire.
The full complaint, once available, is expected to set out the constitutional theories under which Barich and O’Bid contend their rights were violated, the specific city officials or policies at issue, and the remedies sought — typically a combination of damages, declaratory relief and, in some §1983 cases, injunctive relief barring the challenged practice going forward.
Wine Country Daily will update this report once the complaint becomes available and once city officials and counsel respond.
— Roger Coryell, Wine Country Daily