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Council flags rising legal and litigation costs, asks staff for fuller estimates
Summary
Councilors warned that outside legal fees have been running above budget, driven largely by tax-appeal litigation; they asked staff to increase budget estimates or explain offsets and to return updated projections for legal services.
Councilors focused on legal-services lines as a significant budget pressure. Members were told tax-appeal litigation has driven spending well above adopted budgets in prior years.
"Those [tax appeals] have taken on more time and resources because they're in the discovery phase, and that is time consuming," a staff speaker said in answer to a council question about the spending increase.
Councilors requested that staff provide a fuller multi-year average of outside-counsel costs and consider increasing the legal-services line to avoid repeated overages. The finance director noted a legal contingency line is small and asked whether the council wanted to raise the legal allocation to reflect the trends. Staff agreed to return updated actuals and scenarios showing how larger legal reserves would affect the bottom line.
Direction: staff to return historical legal spending by year, a recommended budget for outside counsel based on multi-year averages and the pro forma impact of higher legal estimates on the general fund.
