In today's Pilot is this little article about how "After spending “hundreds and hundreds” of hours on new regulations for group homes, the Newport Beach city attorney’s office is off the case, and a new outside legal firm will be hired." This is, of course, of course, $150,000 has already been spent on another outside legal firm, Goldfarb & Lipman LLP.
I have a problem with this, and it's not because of all the conflict of interest allegations about our own City Attorney, her ties to our other City Attorney (who started the conflict of interest train), or Goldfarb & Lipman LLP, who had previously supposedly represented the rehab homes against cities. Those are all suspect areas.
My problem (today, at least) with this is because the City is throwing lots and lots of the resident's money down a never ending drain.
In private industry, if you hire a team of people who can't get the job done, what do you do? Do you hire more people to do what your people are supposed to do, or do you hire people who can get the job done.
Ok, that's a bit general. Let's use a more specific example.
You hire a CFO to run the financial side of the company.
The IRS sends a letter requesting an audit.
After spending hours and hours on preparing the audit, it turns out that the CFO, who you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on annually, cannot get the job done correctly and you are forced to hire an outside CPA to handle the audit, then it turns out that CPA also cannot handle the audit, and then you hire another CPA to finish the audit.
After the audit, do you:
1. Happily pay everyone for a job they couldn't originally do?
2. Angrily pay everyone for the job they couldn't originally do, but keep your CFO?
3. Quickly fire all the non-capable parties, and hire the CPA would could do the job?
In private industry, normally #3 would be the answer, but in Newport Beach, it appears to be #1.
I'm not saying that our City Attorney is incompetent, she is just in a position to:
"While the City Attorney's Office endeavors to do as much of the City's legal work as possible, certain legal issues are specialized or require such large commitments of time over a short period, that the City contracts with outside law firms to represent the City's interest. Historically, the City has utilized outside law firms to handle matters such as defense of law suits, eminent domain, police civil rights issues and various bond offerings."
I have a question then. Why can't we just have a City Attorney's office who can do all that?
The City spends almost $1 million bucks a year on salary and benefits for the City Attorney's office. Yes, $1 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. You think for a million bucks a year, you can find people who can handle everything listed above, nevermind how much the City spends on outside attorneys.
So I did some research to see what our neighbors do.
Irvine - Contracts their City Attorney out with Rutan and Tucker. Take a look at Philip Kohn's resume and see if he could do the job. Take a look at the other Partners in the firm and see if all Philip would have to do is knock on his neighbors door and get the answer he needs.
Laguna Beach - Guess who they contract their City Attorney service out to? Yup, Rutan and Tucker.
Costa Mesa - Contracts out with Jones & Mayer, take a look at their attorney's resumes and somehow you get a warm fuzzy feeling if Kimberly Barlow runs across something she can't figure out. It took a while to confirm this one, but if you click here and go towards the bottom of the page, you can find their announcement of "Jones & Mayer was recently selected by the City of Costa Mesa to perform contract city attorney services. Kimberly Hall Barlow will be its City Attorney when the contract takes effect."
Huntington Beach - They have their own City Attorney, but guess what, she's elected.
So where does that leave Newport Beach and their million dollar legal department? Nowhere. She still gets her salary and benefits as usual, while approving the massive legal bills for the other outside attorneys.
That's Newport Beach's way. If you can't spend all the money you can, then borrow more (sorry, Certificates of Participations, I meant...) to build a White Elephant.
All the while the battle continues.
More to follow, I'm sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment