Have you hugged your lawyer today? Fayette County taxpayers, you have paid $743,012 to legal firms hired by the Fayette County Commission and the Fayette County Board of Education in the case of the district voting lawsuit and legal appeal.
You will also owe another $787,882 to the plaintiffs’ lawyers should they prevail – and if precedent in more than 100 Georgia counties is any indicator, they will. That’s a total of $1,530,894.
While our county commissioners carefully allocate precious, limited taxpayer dollars to infrastructure improvements, economic development and public safety, they are squandering hundred of thousands of our tax dollars, paying legal fees to Strickland, Brockington, & Lewis, LLP in the district voting appeal totaling so far $434,155.
As our Board of Education members debate the cost benefits of school closures, parapros in classrooms and security systems to protect children in our elementary schools, they are spending education dollars on legal fees owed to the firms Harben, Hartley & Hawkins, and Parks, Chesin, & Walbert totaling $308,857. (Parks, Chesin, & Walbert bills the school board up to $575/hour. By comparison, a teacher earning $40,000/year is paid approximately $19.23/hour.)
And there’s more to come. A federal appeals court recently ruled that the district voting appeal should go to a bench trial. This means we have yet another opportunity to pay enormous sums of money to lawyers. By the time the bench trial is concluded, with expert witness fees and expenses like lodging and travel costs, exhibit costs, and more, the legal bills could include another $1 million.
And if the county loses at a bench trial, Fayette officials could take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court. This idea should make the lawyers very happy indeed; they have much to look forward to.
Or we could end the district voting appeal and move on.
In November, Fayette County voted in districts for the first time in its 193-year history. The results on the County Commission: Pota Coston won in District 5, and Steve Brown won in District 1. These are experienced professionals who will serve Fayette citizens to the best of their ability.
The results on the Board of Education: Leonard Presberg won in District 5, and Diane Basham won in District 4. Mr. Presberg and Ms. Basham each bring intelligence, passion, personal dedication, and decades of educational experience to the job. We can all take pride in these leaders. An at-large voting system could not have yielded any better.
This leaves rational citizens wondering why we would continue to spend obscene amounts of our hard-earned tax dollars on high-priced Atlanta lawyers, with no guarantee of the outcome and no end in sight. Surely we have more worthy priorities in Fayette County for both our money and our time.
I implore the five members of the Fayette County Commission and the five members of the Fayette County Board of Education to stop wasting our tax dollars on a senseless gamble. End the district voting appeal. It’s time to move on.
Kim Learnard
Peachtree City, Ga.
