"Lawyers hit stadium pay dirt: Private attorneys land windfall of public money," was the headline to this story yesterday in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Some quotes:
Eight law firms have been paid almost $7 million since the county first decided to replace Cinergy Field with separate riverfront stadiums for the Cincinnati Bengals and Cincinnati Reds. * * *Re the possibility of taking bids for the legal work:County officials say the money has been well spent on law firms that have negotiated and monitored a tangle of agreements with the sports teams, riverfront landowners, construction companies and the city of Cincinnati. But Auditor Dusty Rhodes, a frequent critic of county spending, says it's time to call an end to the game. The county administration, he says, has grown too dependent on private attorneys for work that the prosecutor's office could do or that doesn't require lawyers. * * *
The prosecutor's office represents county officeholders. It has about two dozen lawyers who handle civil matters on a $4.5 million annual budget. When the prosecutor's office concludes it doesn't have the expertise or time to handle certain complex cases, it recommends that commissioners hire private legal counsel. That can be an expensive decision: county attorneys make an average of $37.61 an hour, versus rates of $200-plus an hour for private lawyers.
"Legal work generally isn't bid for the same reason you wouldn't take bids if you needed surgery - you'd want the best person for the job," said Carl Stich, chief of the prosecutor's civil division.Re the costs of the legal work:
The $6.8 million spent on riverfront-related legal work from the mid-1990s through 2003 amounts to less than 1 percent of the $750 million bill for the two stadiums. Almost two-thirds of the stadium and riverfront work - $4.3 million - has gone to Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease, a downtown Cincinnati law firm. * * * The Indianapolis-based law firm of Ice Miller has run up the second-steepest legal tab * * *. The county has paid Ice Miller $1.2 million over three years.Link via Ed Feigenbaum's Indiana Daily Insight. Posted by Marcia Oddi at May 25, 2004 09:22 AM