Matthew Spina writes in the Buffalo News, Fighting jail suit was costly to county: Bill for protecting records tops $27,000

The Chris Collins team last summer tried to block the New York Civil Liberties Union’s attempt to find out how much Erie County spends fending off jail-related lawsuits.

Collins’ county attorney at the time, Cheryl A. Green, refused to turn over a trove of county records that would answer the Civil Liberties Union’s questions. She was then brought into court and thumped so soundly Erie County was ordered to both turn over the documents and pay the opposition’s legal fees.

But Erie County also was paying $250 an hour to an outside law firm in its effort to keep those public records from public view. With that bill recently paid, the cost of the failed Collins-Green stonewall can now be tallied: $27,523.

That’s enough to have continued county grants in 2011 to, say, the Buffalo City Ballet, Road Less Traveled Productions, El Museo Gallery and the Community Music School of Buffalo — all among the dozens of nonprofit arts providers Collins froze out of his 2011 budget.

Chris Collins is Erie County Executive. Erie County is much more populous (about 930,000 people) than Lowndes County or Valdosta, but some of its problems seem eerily familiar.

The article just keeps getting better. Erie County ran up twice as much in legal expenses astheACLU, and ended up having to pay both sets of legal fees.

“If we had just provided the data in the first place, we would have saved $18,000 for the outside counsel for the county and $9,000 for the Civil Liberties Union,” said Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz, whose staff issues the checks. “All we had to do was be transparent upfront. This follows a pattern of the administration not being open and rejecting requests for information not just from the public but from our office.”

Transparency up front: there’s an idea for local governments here.

-jsq

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