By early 2015, Gilroy officials hope the search for an in-house city attorney—a sea change from its position since the early 1990s of using the city’s contracted legal firm, San Jose-based Berliner Cohen—will have finished and an experienced attorney will fill the new role at City Hall.
The Gilroy City Council voted to form a committee Feb. 24 to seek a new attorney, and they interviewed the top three candidates last weekend—the result of an eight-month nationwide search. The committee is close to making its selection and the new city attorney could be serving Gilroy by January, Mayor Don Gage confirmed.
Council Member Perry Woodward, who brought the item to break away from Berliner Cohen and hire an in-house attorney before the Council every year since he was first elected in 2007, said he’s encouraged by the finalists and confident the move will be a step in the right direction towards transparency.
“I am looking for a city attorney with the guts to stand up to city staff and say ‘the council wants you to be as open as possible,’” said Woodward, who serves on the committee with Gage and Council Member Cat Tucker. “I’m very excited about the applicant pool. We’ve got some really great candidates and the next city attorney is going to be experienced at scrutinizing bills from outside council and making a determination about when we’re being billed appropriately or not.”
Even before becoming an elected official, Woodward said he’s advocated the switch in representation for 17 years, arguing that the contracted firm model lacks accountability. The simple fact Berliner Cohen charges an hourly rate for all work—roughly $232 an hour for everything from telephone calls to researching case law, according to public records—hinders the ability of city employees and council members to utilize the firm as a resource, Woodward said.
“Berliner Cohen was billing us $800,000 or $900,000 for years—sometimes $1 million—a year and the reaction when I started to complain about that was staff started using the city attorney much, much less,” he said. “When it came out how much they were billing us for how little we were getting, the reaction was ‘don’t call them unless you absolutely have to.’
Over time, Woodward said the bills went down because nobody was talking to the city attorney “unless they had to.” His suggestion to switch attorneys stuck when the Council voted 5-2 in favor of seeking new representation.
“We are moving from a big outside law firm in San Jose to having somebody with high professional marks—all these candidates have tremendous experience—in our community on a daily basis, engaging the community by going to Rotary, having lunch with department heads and council members in a way that, for the last 24 years, the big law firm has not been,” Woodward added.
But the move didn’t thrill everyone. At the Feb. 24 meeting where the decision was made, Council Member Terri Aulman spoke out against the switch noting there was no cost comparison. She told the Dispatch she still has concerns about how the new position will cost the city.
“I have reinforced with the Council and the candidates that the bottom line here is we need to save money. I haven’t been shown anything yet that tells me this is going to be a cost saving. I haven’t seen a business case for it,” she added. “As a council member, I’m doing my job but I also have reservations that this isn’t going to be cost effective. I’m just trying to continue to express reservations—not about the candidates—but about the costs.”
Aulman said she has no intention of hindering the process since the majority approved it, but that the Council should be cognizant of the cost moving forward.
For Gage, the fiscal impact of the switch is also an important factor to keep in mind.
“I want to make sure that when we hire somebody they don’t nickel and dime us to death,” he said, noting that experience with a variety of areas of law is an important trait he wants to see in Gilroy’s next city attorney. “With all the issues we have—land use, misdemeanors, etc.—we don’t intend on them trying a lot of cases. (We don’t want) major lawsuits, they just take too much time.”
The city attorney will also be responsible for managing any outside attorneys the city may potentially need to hire, Gage said.
“A lot of the stuff we do is planning, so they’ve got to have land use experience and a broad perspective about what’s going on—that means experience,” he added. “All the people we’ve talked to have experience, including land use.”
Woodward said while his goal is to have the new city attorney hired by the first council meeting in December, the winning candidate will need time to sort out affairs with his or her current employer.
“It’s just a matter of getting them on board,” he added. “All of these people have very important jobs now—important legal jobs—so they’ll have to tie up their professional responsibilities where they are. I would hope that by January we have a new attorney at city hall.”
