12/15/2009 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Council Minutes of 12-15-2009 negotiator to represent the City, as employer, in labor negotiations, believing that not only were labor negotiations not part of the Charter duties of the I,aw Director, but also that the job could be better performed by a person who specialized in such work. I also attempted to lessen the Law Department's direct participation in the areas of service in which the City's two newest departments-Human Resources and Planning -operated. While. the Law Department historically under Mike Gareau, Sr., provided a lot of legal advice and other input into personnel and building and zoning matters, it seemed to me that talented non-lawyers heading these departments could best serve the City in day-to- day personnel and building and zoning matters, and. much of what they did in these departments was not in the nature of legal work that needed hands-on Law Department involvement. I also attempted throughout my eight years to provide what I called in my early campaign literature "ahead of the curve" legal advice, so that the City could stay out of court as much as humanly possible. One of the things I learned as an Assistant Law Director over the course of twenty years was that no matter how worthy your cause, no matter how good your evidence, no matter how able your attorney, litigating any case was filled with a high risk of failure, waste of time, and expense to the City, including the possibility of costly judgments. In my opinion, this is what comes with a system that elects most of its judges on name recognition and then dispenses justice by following a complicated set of rules of procedure that tends to favor deep pocket litigants and large law firms. While there were some accomplishments asnoted above during my two terms as Law Director that I hope improved the operations of the City Law Department, there also were glaring failures; shortcomings on my part, which I hope this apology will help my successor and others in city government avoid. These shortcomings were in my people skills -particularly in developing good attorney-client relationships with my municipal clients. While I am a lifelong Democrat, I ran for office on a campaign promise to serve in a non- partisan manner-that is, to provide the same quality and quantity of legal advice and guidance to City officials regardless of their or my political affiliation. So far so good. But, what I failed to sufficiently appreciate is that we all operate here within a political environment-- all of my clients are political animals, and, while a good Law Director can and should be non-partisan, he or she should never benon-political. As an avowed non-political Law Director, I failed at times to serve all of you as your attorney as well as I should have. By being overly and overtly non-political, I often at times was insensitive to yow needs as politicians, and I often times provided you with legal advice that was either not as well communicated to you as it should have been, or which failed to take into account the politics of an issue. As a result, because I was not sufficiently political in establishing attorney-client. relationships, these relationships were often not as productive for either of us over these past eight years as they could or should have been. I also acknowledge and recognize that I was not as good a manager of the City Law Department as I should have been. Necessarily much of the legal work and guidance that comes out of the Law Department is provided by individuals other than the Law Director-by the City Prosecutor, the Assistant Law Directors, andlor outside counsel. Sometimes even by the Department Secretary or by law clerks. While I certainly endeavored to be a good manager, I found that the job of managing the very talented 6