Council asks for multi-year breakdown of roughly $750,000 in legal fees

Councilors asked the city attorney and finance staff on April 1 to produce a clearer, multi-year accounting of legal expenditures after staff noted roughly $750,000 in legal-related professional services year-to-date.

City Attorney Ashley described a framework for categorizing legal costs into discrete buckets—municipal law, municipal court, labor and employment law, land-use, real estate, public records, environmental, franchise and contract disputes—and recommended working with finance to map invoices to those categories. Ashely said she had not billed the city for initial work on the request and that invoice-level categorization would require manual review.

Finance Director Gloria said the city already codes many attorney invoices by department in professional-services line items and that staff can run detailed reports showing which budgets attorneys were charged to. She and other staff cautioned that extracting invoice-level narrative (what each invoice specifically addressed) would take additional manual time.

Councilors proposed a three-year window for the review and asked to see a consolidated report that shows attorney payments by vendor and department; several suggested a council member or independent reviewer could do further peer review if the report surfaced concerns. No decision was made to commission an external audit; council directed staff to prepare the internal breakout first and then consider next steps if further review is warranted.