Fred Galante

Equity Partner

Fred Galante is a founding partner of Aleshire & Wynder.  His experience includes litigation of land use, civil rights, Brown Act, California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and public contract issues as well as transactional work.  He serves as City Attorney and Successor Agency Counsel for the City of Chino and the City of Cypress.  He also serves as General Counsel for the Orange County Council of Governments (OCCOG), Housing Authority of the County of San Bernardino and the Home Gardens County Water District.  He also serves as Special Counsel to the San Diego Housing Commission and San Diego County Water Authority.

Fred’s experience includes: advising cities on various issues, negotiating and drafting real property leases, redevelopment, solid waste, mining and other land use related agreements, and representing public agencies at open and closed session meetings and public hearings.  He has managed several litigation matters, including challenges to denials of various permits and entitlements, breach of contract, nuisance, inverse condemnation, and civil rights matters. In his code enforcement practice, he successfully secured several jury trial verdicts.  Additionally, he has secured two bench trial verdicts in contract disputes, writ of mandate proceedings, restraining orders against persons harassing public employees, and various dismissals before trial of cases initiated against his public entity clients.

Fred served as City Attorney for the City of Irwindale for 17 years where he successfully assisted in resolving longstanding bitter disputes with some of the City’s mining operators, including by leveraging litigation successes against one such company to gain a favorable global settlement of disputes lasting over 20 years.  He has negotiated and prepared several significant redevelopment and housing development deals for Irwindale as well as the Cities of Lynwood and Rialto where Fred served as City Attorney and Agency Counsel for each for 6 years. Examples of such projects include successful developments of formerly mined or contaminated sites, multi-phase single family and multi-family affordable housing developments, large and small retail, industrial developments, and a solid waste material recovery facility/transfer station development.

In his tenure as General Counsel, Fred helped OCCOG become a self -sufficient organization, funded by dues payments from its member agencies, which included all cities in Orange County, the County of Orange and special districts. He further advised the OCCOG in preparing the Sub-Regional Sustainable Communities Strategy for Orange County in accordance with SB 375, which was adopted in its entirety by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) as part of SCAG’s Regional Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities. Strategy.

As City Attorney for Chino, he oversaw resolution of disputes with five major residential developers on behalf of Chino, concerning $98 million in bonded work, focusing on accessibility of public improvements under the Americans with Disabilities Act and California state accessibility laws. Five settlement agreements were approved unanimously by the City Council, followed thereafter by unanimous acceptance of previously constructed but not yet approved improvements. The settlements also provided for in-lieu payments by some of the developers to the City to off-set updated remediation costs for a select subset of the disputed improvements. The settlement agreements provided all ongoing and future accessibility improvements by the developers to meet the City’s exacting accessibility standards. This result culminated several years of discussions and negotiations with the developer community, five national and regionally known developers, and City’s staff to achieve a mutually-beneficial resolution that strengthened relationships, did not compromise the City’s commitment to accessibility under state and federal law, and avoided costly litigation.

He has presented several discussions on conflicts of interests, AB1234, California’s mining and reclamation law (SMARA), CEQA, the Surplus Land Act, and the Brown Act, including through The Lorman Education Group, Independent Cities Association, California Chapter of the American Planning Association, and Inland Empire City Attorneys’ Association.  He has served as an editor of the Finance Chapter of the League of California Cities, Municipal Law Handbook.  For several years, he presented on the Brown Act and distinctions between general law versus charter law cities at the Rialto Institute of Progress, recipient of the 2015 SCAG Visionary Award.

Fred speaks Spanish fluently.  He was born in Mexico City and moved to the United States when he was eight years old.  He received his B.A. in Economics from California State University at Northridge in 1992 and his J.D. in 1995 from Loyola Law School and was on the Dean’s List at both institutions.