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January 22, 2007

Outside Counsel, Inside Council

City Manager Bernie Lynch will report to the City Council tomorrow night that he has spent close to $13,000 on outside legal services for independent reports and opinions over the past few months. The outsourcing of services, as Lynch sees it, is for certain specialized cases where the city's Law Department might lack the expertise or where there might be a conflict of interest. Of course, Lynch could also depend on the outsourcing to either validate the Law Department's opinion on an issue, or to reject it.
So why did Lynch hire the firm of Kopelman and Paige? There were questions of police indemnification (the Boutselis case), the employees' health care, research on public ways, and f contract issues (towing). The total bill for these opinions came to about $3,500.
Also, K&P was hired to review the Stocklosa School building project and the chronology of events leading up to the mysterious elimination of three classrooms from the original design and then their replacement, at a cost of $290,000.
NOne of these issues, in my view, rise to a conflict of interest, unless someone believes there might be a conflict of interest among personnel working in the Law Department. Hmmm?
Now I'm just rendering a guess that the outside counsel came to the same conclusion that the Law Department did on many of these same issues, particularly the Stocklosa School and police indemnifcation. So maybe Lynch just wanted a "second opinion." Or maybe he wanted to question the advice of his own legal department. Whatever, it will be interesting to see how much more Lynch must outsource to get an opinion in the future. Doesn't he trust the city's law department of 13 full- and part-time solicitors? And why all these outside legal opinions all of a sudden? Could the "inside" council be telling him what to do? Good question. (Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't supposed to mention the fact that they all live in Belvidere. Something about pitting people against each other. Give me a break.)
One thing I do know: there are a lot of thin-skinned people running the city. They can't stand to be questioned, whether it comes from an editor or a septugenarian who happens to be a former city manager.
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Posted by JimC at January 22, 2007 9:59 AM

Comments

Posted by: Bill Deignan at March 6, 2007 5:20 PM