‘That’s full baloney.’ Eagle mayor responds to accusations that he’s ignoring City Council
It took less than five minutes for the sparks to fly at last Thursday’s City Council meeting in Eagle.
Right away, Council President Kenny Pittman accused Mayor Jason Pierce of yet again ignoring the will of the City Council and charging forward with his own agenda.
“This was another deliberate attempt to undermine the will and the direction of the council,” Pittman said.
Pittman was referring to Pierce’s decision to issue a request for proposals to hire new outside legal counsel. That contradicted a motion from the City Council in March that directed the mayor to organize a workshop meeting during which the City Council could decide whether it was necessary to hire new legal counsel at all.
Pittman said he felt the same way earlier this year, when Pierce pushed for the city to sell the Eagle Landing Community Center and build a new center, just days after the council had recommended that the city conduct a cost analysis of the two options and form a committee to make a decision.
“We had four different meetings and four different motions, and the mayor decided to not use any of our direction and do it his own way,” Pittman said. “And that is not the responsibility of the mayor.”
“That’s full baloney,” Pierce responded. “You’re not telling the full story.”
Over the last several months, the mayor and two newest council members, Brad Pike and Charlie Baun, who were elected in 2019, have butted heads with the two council holdovers, Pittman and Miranda Gold. And while they have sometimes conceded to taking more gradual approaches, such as first agreeing to a cost analysis on a new community center, they have typically come around to voting with the mayor.
Pittman and Gold have pushed back repeatedly as Pierce works to undo many of the policies of his predecessor, Stan Ridgeway, from selling the community center that Ridgeway opened in 2019 to changing the city’s litigation strategy.
Eagle’s counsel MSBT resigns
Under Ridgeway, the city hired Holland and Hart, a Colorado firm with a Boise office, to handle the city’s lawsuits: one against the Eagle Water Co. for selling its water rights to the multinational water utility company Suez, and a second against the Two Rivers Homeowners Association for blocking public access to a parking lot the city says the association was required to build and keep open. It also hired the Boise firm Parsons, Behle and Latimer to work on other water rights issues.
The city also contracted with the Meridian firm Borton Lakey for its day-to-day legal needs, like reviewing city ordinances, after its former law firm, Boise’s MSBT Law, resigned in January 2019 as the city was in the midst of deciding whether to sue Eagle Water.
On Jan. 30, MSBT wrote a letter in a letter to Ridgeway and the City Council in which it said continuing to represent the city would “result in rules of professional conduct, and in which the client insists upon taking action with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement.”
Ridgeway previously told the Statesman that MSBT did not provide information to his administration about a 2008 contract that MSBT attorney Susan Buxton had executed, which gave the city a right of first refusal to the sale of Eagle Water.
“In a city where there’s elections, where engineers and attorneys remain constant, they should be advising you on what’s taken place in the past,” Ridgeway told the Statesman.
MSBT lawyer Cherese McLain, in recent letters to Pierce and the City Council, has said “the city is the repository of its official documents, particularly contracts.” She also complained that MSBT had been relegated to a “need to know” basis by Ridgeway’s administration which “constrained” the firm’s “ability to maintain an open dialogue with the elected leaders.”
“We never constrained them whatsoever,” Ridgeway said in a phone interview Wednesday. He said he constantly asked MSBT for information about documents related to previous discussions with Eagle Water, and that the city had to locate many of them on its own.
Pierce pushes to re-hire law firm
Weeks after Pierce took office in January of this year, the new mayor talked with lawyers from MSBT to discuss rehiring the firm. On Feb. 5, McLain provided Pierce with a letter outlining a legal services agreement.
Later, at a March 24 City Council meeting, Pierce brought up bringing on MSBT to help handle some of the additional work that was created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In this situation, we’ve been kind of doing a lot of ordinances and different things that we have to make sure get done properly, and then we also have the ongoing business that we’re taking care of,” Pierce said at that meeting.
Pittman and Gold encouraged the council not to hire MSBT.
“MSBT Law resigned,” Pittman said. “They were not asked to resign — they quit. Why would we bring somebody back that quit?”
The council unanimously denied Pierce’s attempt to hire the firm. It then directed the mayor to organize a workshop during which the council could discuss whether it should hire additional legal help, and then to put together a request for proposals if it was deemed necessary.
Instead, Pierce issued a request-for proposals on April 3. He received nine applications from various law firms, including MSBT, which he presented to the council on Thursday.
City Council discussion gets heated
During that meeting, Pittman said the city should not veer from its current legal representation.
“Right now, a change is not needed,” Pittman said. “Borton and Lakey was decided by the previous council and mayor.”
“I’m going to tell you something about the previous council and mayor,” Pierce responded. “Three people ran for office. All three people lost because people didn’t like what was being done.
“The residents of Eagle spoke: They wanted things done differently,” Pierce continued. “And that is what we’re working toward now. What we need to do now is having some adult conversation about how we want to get there.”
Pittman pushed back, arguing that Pierce should have organized the discussion on whether additional legal help was even necessary before he organized the request for proposals.
But Pierce argued that the proposals from the nine law firms gave the council further information to make their decision.
“We spend almost $30,000 a month on outside attorneys,” Pierce said. “I want to make sure that we do the best due diligence.”
Pierce said that from 2015 through 2018, the city spent about $170,000 per year on attorneys. In 2019, the costs escalated to $466,252 as a result of the city’s two lawsuits.
“I think it’s important as we move forward on that stuff that we let the public know what it is costing,” Pierce said. “I think it’s important we look at what we can do to accomplish the best for the city of Eagle residents.”
Pierce did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Pittman argued that even if the city did contract with a new firm, the firm might not be able to represent the city in its lawsuits. “No one is going to have all that the city needs,” he said.
The council voted to table the discussion until it could compare the costs of hiring an in-house counsel versus contracting with a new firm.
This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 2:09 PM.
