Mika Meyers, Rural Development Outlawyers

[XLFD]

It should come as little surprise to those that read our articles that the Ludington City Attorney, which is effectively a contracted law firm originally from Manistee, but now from Grand Rapids, has little respect for laws and ethical conduct.  They were hired back in 2009, and were unanimously granted a 70% raise of their retainer the next year, they have grown their retainer over $50,000, meaning that even if they do nothing other than send a representative to each council meeting, they will get that sum. 

They have also raised their per hour rate to $210 for 'special projects', and seem to have been getting a lot of special projects given to them by our city manager lately.  If not, they create special projects by introducing controversy into the city mix with ordinances and policies that stretch what a city is legally able to do, such as the Rental Inspection Ordinance, and the Workplace Safety Policy. 

Is that compatible with what happens elsewhere around here?  The City of Scottville hires a local lawyer, Tracy Thompson of Ludington, to do their legal work.  His yearly retainer is not over $50,000, not over $25,000, not even over $10,000.  Over $5000?  Nope.

Thompson receives a retainer of $3000 and does special legal projects at the more reasonable rate of $175 per hour.  A busy year may see him getting around $10,000 altogether, like he did last year.  He's been at work for Scottville for twenty years without any noticeable complaints from either the city or the citizens.

Not so with Ludington's law firm, Mika Meyers, PLC, previously the Gockerman, Wilson, Saylor & Hesslin firm from Manistee who merged into the bigger firm of over 50 lawyers based in GR.  Their unethical behavior came to light in a lot of corners of my first lawsuit with the city when they (and Judge Cooper) concealed the fact to the plaintiffs that the judge's son had come forth to represent the City.  Wilson and Saylor collected over $20,000 of the citizen's tax money in fighting a battle they lost immediately, but they did quite a lot, as I explained in a brief to the Michigan Court of Appeals:  Collusion/Corruption Between City of Ludington and 51st Circuit Court

Lately, they have been doing the business primarily of deflecting the illegal and/or unethical conduct of other officials or official acts, and collecting money from the city while they supposedly conduct city business covertly to avoid the oversight of the people, as in The Privileged Secrets of Ludington's Negotiations with Michigan Po...  Of course, they can't be denied to have stolen more from the cookie jar than they deserved, overbilling the city by as much as $150/hour, and not just on one pay invoice, but over 30 over a 3 year period  Executive Embezzlement in Ludington: Obvious Overbilling. 

The latest outrage inflicted on the taxpayer was to have the city attorney (Wilson) draft four agreements between the city and his firm suggesting the legal work required between the City and Rural Development for the upgrades to the WWTP and the WTP would approach $50,000, when such an estimate was not only beyond the pale, but mostly subsumed in their normal $50,000+ per year retainer  Ludington City Manager and City Attorney Partners in Crime Again. 

It also violated the City's requirement to perform competitive bidding for contracts of such magnitude.  Undoubtedly, Ludington's-ownTracy Thompson could have done the work for at least five times less, if his experience with Rural Development from the Scottville sewer overhaul project in 2003 is any indication. 

But related to this latest RD agreement is a new billing scheme that violates agreements and even the law.  The law firm of Mika Meyers PLC is billing us for work that they cannot legally perform yet.  Briefly presented, the March 21 meeting of which Ordinance 326-16 was passed had the ordinance drawn up (see it here:  p. 118+ of 3-21-2016 packet)

Summarized, the city manager and clerk could sign the legal services agreement with Mika Meyers 20 days after the ordinance was passed.  This follows Section 7.2 of the city charter :  "The effective date of any new or revised, altered, or amended ordinance shall be described therein and shall not be earlier than twenty (20) days after its adoption and publication, unless the Council shall, upon attaching a declaration of emergency affecting the public peace, health, or safety, fix an earlier date, in which case the ordinance shall become effective immediately upon publication."

If the ordinance was published (see section 7.3 of the charter for definition of publication of ordinances) effectively in an article in the next days City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews), (i.e. on March 22) then twenty days after that would be April 11, coincidentally, the same day as the next council meeting.  I was sent the 4-11-2016 packet by E-mail on the afternoon of April 8th, if you take a look at p. 46 and 47 of that packet you will see the following (without highlights):

This shows that by the afternoon of April 8th, Mika Meyers had sent an invoice to the city charging for RD water and sewer project work already performed for the City.  Yet, no official of the city had conferred that ability for them to work and be paid for their services on RD projects until at least April 11.  The ordinance and our charter is clear on that point. 

It also seems odd that the amount of time spent for both projects is the same, and that the amount, $766.50, is exactly 3.65 times their hourly rate.  Many law firms will charge for tenths or quarters of an hour, but this is the first time I've seen one charging for twentieths of an hour.   If you note the four legal services agreements (p. 119+ of 3-21-2016 packet), what one notices that the only charge allowed to the law firm is their $210 per hour cost.

Which makes the excessive amount of RD charges made by the law firm in this period's financial report especially suspicious.  You will locate it on p. 31-32 4-25-2016 Packet, and see that the firm has billed $3521.98 to the wastewater fund and $3521.97 to the water fund.  Those amounts divided by $210 comes far from any proper fraction of an hour, roughly 16.7713 hours each.

For some reason, unclear to me, Mika Meyers spent around 35 hours of attorney time in handling such matters in the first two weeks of their legitimate time on these projects.  Good attorneys can accomplish quite a bit in such time, but up to this point, when nothing has yet been done, nothing controversial legally seems to exist, and RD has undoubtedly streamlined the process to make many rural entities not add any extra legal costs in their legal service agreements, the billed time is extraordinarily high. 

Should the citizens of Ludington and the city council of Ludington tolerate such lawless behavior by our city attorney law firm from Grand Rapids when we have options like Tracy Thompson in our own backyard? 

[AQUAMAN]

All you need is for the City Mgr. to say to the council, pay the City Attorney $$$$$, and you get their blessing, no questions asked, nor any need to investigate into the matter properly, for accountability. Partners in Crime is exactly what is going on, and not even getting a wink or nod by Ludington's citizens being bilked like this.

[Willy]

Excellent work X. Of course the center of all these suspicious dealings is  Mr. Shay. Where is the Council's oversight on these matters? In other words what in the hell are they doing or not doing? Can the Council be this stupid? Why have a Council at all if the hired hands are going to run the show and are not being held accountable. Just the fact that Ludington has hired high paying attorneys to handle mundane FOIA requests is a very telling example of how the City is being held hostage by a group of unabashed authoritarians.