The Freedom of Information complaint brought by resident Jay Meisinger against a handful of top city officials highlights one of the things that's always struck me as wrong about government.
At tonight's City Council session, the city attorney, Ed Krawiecki, Jr, called the complaint "a contested, adversarial case" that required the same vigorous defense that lawyers offer in typical lawsuits brought against the town.
But it's not.
In this case, unless I'm off my rocker, what residents want isn't to win the case. It's to find out the entire truth of what happened and determine whether or not any local officials violated open government laws.
The city's lawyers shouldn't be treating this as "a contested, adversarial case" because the people who pay their salaries aren't interested in beating Meisinger in a legal showdown. They're interested in candor, openness and a decision that determines whether anybody did anything wrong.
Why, for example, would Krawiecki tell Mayor William Stortz and city councilors not to discuss the complaint at all? Is he worried they'll let something out of the bag that might make it less likely the city will "win?" So what? Why should he even care?
The city lawyer said that Bristol's attorneys "need to develop our defense" in order "to protect all of your collective interest."
That might be the most telling comment of all.
Because Krawiecki is not saying that his office is trying to protect the "collective interest" of Bristol as a whole, merely the officials who are accused of doing something improper.
It strikes me, as it always has, that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for lawyers to defend officials in open government matters. Where is the public interest in that? What is the rationale? Isn't what we all want simply the truth, unvarnished?
What's happening here is that municipal lawyers are mistakenly acting as if they represent the mayor and a handful of city councilors rather than representing everyone in town. I always thought that the interests of the people whose taxes pay the attorneys should be front and center.
For now, at least, they aren't.
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Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com
5 comments:
Interesting point. Ultimately, the city attorney does have the obligation to represent city officials when acting in their official capacity, even when they are members of opposing political parties. If representation were not provided, and city officials had to pay lawyers out of their own pocket, I doubt many people would be able to take the financial risk that serving in an elected position would then entail.
Perhaps the answer would be to have a "citizen's advocate" who would solely represent the public interest when complaints were filed.
Steve: I am being self-serving here, but how is this any different from the City Attorney defending the Zoning Commission when a developer complains that he was illegally denied? They always claim that the Zoning Commission acted illegally. It's up to the Court to decide whether they did or not, and it's the City Attorney's job to make the case that they did not.
Fair question, Craig.
The answer is that attorneys for the city need to do what's best for the community that pays them. Defending a zoning decision, assuming there's merit to the zoning panel's argument, is the sort of case that we have lawyers for. If we don't defend land use decisions, why bother having the boards?
But in this case, the attorney isn't defending a city decision. He's merely defending the actions of a handful of city leaders who may or may not have acted properly.
The real thing, though, is to look at the consequences. If the city did not violated the law, then treating this case a simple pursuit of the truth, not adversarial, would be fine. If the council violated the FOI law, then most all of us, probably including you, would agree that the appropriate remedy should be applied by the FOI Commission. I could see a lawyer arguing against a particular recommendation in order to protect the interests of the city as a whole.
Where is the benefit to the city to win an argument that the FOI complaint was off the mark unless it was off the mark? As it is, there's a stacked deck, with one resident lodging a complaint and an entire city attorney's office fighting him.
Craig jumped in the cage with the Den mother - now deal with your it, no matter what. Ellen is using you, Kevin and the new comers and you are all to dumb to know it.
what happens if ward needs a lawyer?
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