Thomas Breen photo
Corporation Counsel John Rose Jr. on Monday night.
The city’s top lawyer wants to hire an attorney specifically for the Board of Education so that the school system doesn’t have to spend upwards of $450,000 a year on outside legal fees.
City Corporation Counsel John Rose Jr. made that hiring pitch on Monday night to the Board of Alders Finance Committee during its second public hearing and first department-level workshop on Mayor Toni Harp’s proposed $556.6 million operating budget for Fiscal Year 2019 – 2010 (FY20).
The hearing brought out around two dozen people, almost all city department heads and staffers, to the Hill Regional Career High School auditorium on Legion Avenue in the Hill.
Rose told the alders that he would like to eliminate from his department a vacant legal assistant position, which has a budgeted salary of $68,116, and create instead a new assistant corporation counsel position, which would have a budgeted salary of $86,737.
This lawyer would serve as an in-house counsel for the BOE. The mayor’s proposed budget assumes that the BOE would reimburse the city $30,000 for a portion of the new lawyer’s salary.
“For this city not to have an in-place lawyer assigned to the Board of Education, in my opinion, is a very bad idea,” Rose said on Monday, “and we’re trying to fix that at last.”
Finance Committee alders at budget workshop.
East Rock Alder Anna Festa asked if the school board currently has any in-house attorneys.
“No,” Rose replied. All BOE-related litigation comes to his office, he said, or its farmed out to outside counsel.
“If there was a lawyer there,” he said, “we would save money on outside counsel. We would be in a position to block litigation that ought not happen. We’d be in a position to have the city know, before a lawsuit is brought, where that issue is.”
Rose said that, when he was corporation counsel for the City of Hartford, “the smartest lawyer I had was assigned to the Board of Education.”
The BOE’s current fiscal year budget sets aside $450,000 for “legal/lawyers” fees.
The school system’s chief operating officer, Mike Pinto, did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article on how much the BOE has actually spent on legal fees so far this fiscal year.