I’ve given the Union-Tribune’s editorial board a lot of grief, so it would only be fair for me to spotlight it when it expresses something well. If you don’t want to read the whole piece, the editorial board took members of the City Council to task for spending $20,000 to hide from the public basic facts about how they’re spending the public’s money on outside lawyers.
I particularly enjoyed the introduction:
Having been called on so often in recent years to rationalize dubious decisions that have little to do with the public interest, San Diego City Council members have their spiels down pat. The attorneys made us do it, they insist – we’d do the right thing if only we could.
But the U-T still hasn’t followed up on this little nugget that came out about those legal bills for which the paper laments taxpayers having to foot the bill.
The nut graf in that story:
Invoices submitted by attorneys for City Councilwoman Toni Atkins state that her attorney, Sean Prosser, had three teleconferences with Kelly Bowers, senior regional assistant director in the SEC’s Los Angeles office, “regarding potential settlement parameters” on Jan. 30.
This, of course, was an interesting passage not blacked out by her attorneys. Whether they meant to black all of those kinds of disclosures out or merely some of them, we won’t know. But I’m guessing they just dropped the ball, to the benefit of those who are interested in what’s going on with the millions in taxpayer funds Atkins and others are spending.