At the fairly uneventful July 25, 2016 Ludington City Council meeting there was a point of contention that a citizen brought up that was sadly underreported by the City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews) about the Ludington city attorney law firm, Mika Meyers PLC of Grand Rapids, and its representative, Richard Wilson. 

The citizen, Tom Rotta, is a candidate for the Third Ward councilor seat to be decided in November and had brought up numerous concerns about the unethical and unlawful acts of the city manager and attorney since 2009.  This night he would focus more on the latest financial aspects of our city attorney, comparing it with the Scottville City Attorney and their main representative Tracy Thompson of Ludington.  It was a factual presentation showing the disparity and a plea for the council to understand why many citizens are wondering about the arrangement.  The speech starts in the video below at the 3:00 mark, and is annotated with links and supporting pics..   

July 25, 2016 Ludington City Council meeting from Mason County District Library on Vimeo.

Rotta (XLFD):  "The annual retainer of our city attorney law firm from Grand Rapids, Mika Meyers PLC, represented primarily by Richard Wilson costs the City of Ludington $63,000.  They earn this amount regardless of whether they have any work to do other than attend these meetings and draft routine ordinances. 

The City of Scottville has retained the local law firm of Thompson, Thompson & Glanville over the last twenty years and their annual retainer is only $3000.  They attend the same amount of meetings as Ludington's council and draft routine ordinances. 

$63,000 is not only $60,000 more than $3000, it is also twenty one times as much money, just as retainer.  Why does the city hire a Grand Rapids law firm over a local law firm that works for so much less?  A firm that would invest much of that money back into the Ludington area.  But there are additional considerations that make this even a worse deal for the local taxpayers. 

The City's current law firm does not handle criminal violations of local laws; instead we spend $15,000 to contract Paul Spaniola.  And although the city foolishly wastes money on hiring an attorney to handle FOIA requests, they set aside $15,000 to give to another attorney for work that eventually has to be done by city officials anyway. 

The city's baseline attorney fees then is at $93,000, $90,000 more than Scottville's base, thirty-one times as much even if nothing is done in the legal field.  Let's look past the baseline to hourly fees.  Tracy Thompson charges at a rate $45 per hour less than what we pay Mika Meyer's attorneys. 

That's presuming that attorney Richard Wilson doesn't overbill us at the $340 per hour rate, nearly twice the amount Thompson charges, like he did on several occasions when he was overbilling the City for three consecutive years, with John Shay's full complicity over that period.  During this same period, they conspired to avoid the parameters of the Open Meetings Act by funneling public money via Wilson and billed as attorney fees to a water/sewer cost of service consultant.  That’s not only unethical, that’s illegal.

Let's look even past that and look at what they are charging us for the mostly routine legal work associated with the attorney agreement required for the Rural Development loans.  Beyond their $63,000 per year, they will get an additional $50,000 for work that honorable lawyers like Tracy Thompson and other Ludington lawyers would subsume is part of their yearly retainer.  You will be reviewing $30,000 of that charge once again this meeting.  You can either accept it once again or do what you should have done in the first place according to the charter:  put it up for competitive bids and pick the low bids.  [Here's where the three minutes were up, the last sentence:]

Or better yet, let Attorney Wilson and his law firm friends do it as part of their ungodly high $63,000 annual retainer." 

The numbers that I put forth are verified by the record.  The retainer as noted, is given to both law firms whether they have major projects underway or not.  The city's are remarkably similar in many ways as per the legal work and time that is expended on routine tasks for these disparate retainers.  As noted, if there is extra work needed, the Mika Meyers firm gets a significantly higher rate of pay, even when performed by paralegals who would normally be reimbursed under $100.

Richard Wilson and John Shay once again passed on explaining why their scheme to funnel money through the law firm to secretly pay for consultations wasn't illegal and against the OMA, neither did the council.  I have introduced this a half of a dozen times and it has been ignored by one and all, but it is a big issue, and one that will be properly investigated in due time. 

In the meantime, however, I was slightly taken aback that almost one hour after my comment, Councilor Katie Moonbeam (aka Kathy Winczewski) decided a counterattack was in order.  In her best scolding manner she questioned my assessment of the situation and praised the officials who have repeatedly acted improperly throughout recent years.  Her statement is given in full, with my own annotations [in blue] at the end of each paragraph.

 

Kathy Winczewski (1:02:40) "I'd just like to open up some minds and ask a few questions here.  Number one:  Did you ever think there was a reason we hire Mika Meyers as our legal consultants?  There must be a reason that we all feel that they're valuable.  [Katie leads off with a #1, but never gets to a #2 in her presentation, very unscholarly for the former teacher, but not surprising with her lack of supporting evidence she winds up giving.]

Do you understand their expertise, and what we need as the City of Ludington?  Have you looked into that?  Do you understand the legal differences between Scottville Michigan and Ludington Michigan?  [Is she saying that Ludington firm Thompson, Thompson and Glanville (TTG) does not have expertise?  TTG have twenty years in hardscrabble Scottville without any issues come up.  In the seven years Attorney Wilson and his crew have been doing Ludington's legal legerdemain, they have overbilled for years, encouraged Shay to perjure himself to create a defense for not disclosing non-exempt records while knowing that the judge's son was representing the city, getting more than $10,000 during that time the impropriety was not disclosed, etc.  Oh, yes, I have looked into that, Katie!  Furthermore, both cities are home ruled cities with incredibly similar charters and code rules, hence the legal differences are very minimal.  The size differential mostly comes into play for special projects, that they get paid per hour for their services.  Ludington will typically get more of these since they are about seven times larger in population]

And let me give you just one example.  We are revamping the water and sewer plants, at a price to Ludington, legal fees to Ludington, bond issue for Ludington, which Scottville will have to pay for also, but they don't... they are not in charge of the legal.  They just get the water and the sewer.  We have to handle all the legal. [... and Ludington's council, without using competitive bids, have created an attorney agreement that grants Mika Meyers $50,000 plus their yearly retainer of $63,000 over these years of construction.  When Scottville redid the majority of their water/sewer system back 15 years ago, they hired an outside law firm to handle the Rural Development loan, and the money they charged for a more complex task was subsumed in the project itself, not taken from the City's general fund.]

And as you guys have heard, who have been to the city council meetings, there's lots of legal stuff with that; lots of it, okay?  Have you ever worked with Mr. Wilson?  When I have a personal question about one of the things in building and licensing, or something else, he's always very prompt and gives me correct information as soon as I need it.  [Legal stuff?!  Need I remind you that Richard Wilson has offered legal advice that has led to the city losing or settling many legal matters that he was personally involved in creating.  The Workplace Safety Policy (WSP), The Brother Street OMA lawsuit, two (soon to be three) FOIA lawsuits just from me alone.  Katie, if you look for him for advice, you are assuming your information is correct.  But like his opinion about the WSP and whether Ryan Cox could be a reserve officer and a mayor at the same time, he was dead wrong in his info when fairly assessed.]

Those are all things you need to ask yourself, instead of just criticizing the things we do.  And if a water pipe breaks like it did a few years ago, or last year at West Shore Bank, it would be pretty tough to get everybody's point of view in the city of Ludington before we get that fixed.  [Pointing out statistics, ethics, and laws may sound like criticism to city officials, but this 'feel-good' speech doesn't even bother to try to refute the seemingly irrefutable facts.  As for emergency repairs, you should point out that the City of Ludington is approaching 150 years of incorporation and it seems to have been able to deal with emergencies alright without taking out accountability before John Shay decides it's finally a great idea. 

As for fixing broken water pipes, let's not forget that your henchman John Shay has oversaw the broken sewer mains that flooded the PM Bayou with raw sewage in recent years and has done squat in correcting the issue, while you and your fellow councilors and even your AFFEW friends ignored it totally.  You are a large part of the problem with our environment, Katie .] 

And I trust our city manager to make those right decisions.  And I'm sorry that some people don't.  [As I have illustrated over the years, CM John Shay is as crooked as a dog's hind leg (Here's a starter pack of why).  Katie conveniently leaves off where John Shay has made the right decisions, and why they were right.  In fact, she leaves off any detail throughout her closing argument, making it a vacuous exercise in trying to prove a point that she apparently cannot.  That's poor teaching in my book.]

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WOW, I am very disappointed hearing this! Again I can not wrap my head around this happening? Why do they not listen to the people that live there?

In a city manager system where the city manager has free reign to do the executive actions of the city, a city manager with fourteen years of experience can craft illusions that complicit or guileless councilors buy into.  A 'bubble' is created where councilors will willingly sacrifice their soul to make sure the manager is seen as being successful, even though he may take the fall for them at times to preserve some councilor's political careers. 

City manager systems look efficient, but it takes away public accountability of city hall as non-elected officials, usually from other places and with their own agendas, begin directing where the city goes, which can go greatly against what the electorate want.  It's why our current batch always try to avoid charter-mandated votes in changing our parks.

Excellent article X revealing the underbelly of Ludington's politicians. Moonbeam is as bad as Wholeman. I didn't think there could be 2 woman as ignorant as these two serving on the Council at the same time. Doubling down on dumb seems to be what's gong on. 

This is somewhat important to note in this discussion that it perhaps merits a full article in itself.  Here are the four original 'legal agreements' that Richard Wilson wrote up for the Rural Development loans (starting at page 146).  Reviewing the documents, he does not describe the legal work in any detail what the two $10,000 and two $15,000 agreements ($50,000 total) are for, except in section A of the agreements, which describes what may be done, using the exact same details for each of the disparate phases, even though those phases deal with two different systems (wastewater and water supply) and two different areas of each (the plants and the conduits). 

Thanks to the City of Scottville, I have an old attorney agreement for their major sewer/water upgrade at the beginning of the century.  They actually contracted the work with Mika Meyers too, but this was more than a decade before they assimilated the Manistee law firm that Richard Wilson was part of. 

The experienced attorney at that time was very explicit in his details of the work likely to be performed.  It was a fairly sizable contract because they were actually doing a lot more than what they are doing for Ludington now.  Take a look at the snippet from the attached document (below).  The agreement does not grant any money to City Attorney Thompson, the 'legal stuff' he would do would either be of the routine stuff covered in his retainer fees or billed to the city if it went beyond that. 

If you look at the amount they want it is fairly large, but they were doing things that are not part of the work here.  They are not bond counsel, they are not scheduled to revise various ordinances in the future (this has already been done before the loan, by consultants mainly).  Taking those out of the equation you are left with $12,500 for things like title opinions and related matters which they explain at the end of the snippet, which would be very much below that $12,500 because the work (particularly at the plants) have no easement issues or otherwise. 

Wilson has not explained why any of the routine legal work involved in these upgrades would be needed to be billed as special work, since due to the nature of the repairs, there may not be anything more to do other than look over documents and give legal advice.  Standard stuff.  Wilson has not ever tried to explain anything specific to this project that would make it specialized to it. 

Attachments:

Amazing example of possible gross incompetence or possibly legal corruption or whatever fits the description regarding the relationship between the City and City Attorney. Legal corruption would be akin to FBI Director's assessment of Hillary Clinton's methods of performing her Governmental duties.

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