More than 10 days after voters in the proposed footprint of St. George approved incorporating the new city, expected legal challenges have yet to be filed by those working closely with the city administration and other groups opposed to incorporation.
Attorney Mary Olive Pierson, who has said publicly she is planning to file lawsuits challenging the incorporation on several legal grounds, won’t say when she and other attorneys working on her legal team intend to file suit.
But St. George organizers are preparing their legal team and defense. St. George attorney and spokesman Drew Murrell says he will not be the lead attorney defending the city’s efforts to incorporate from a 60-square-mile area of unincorporated East Baton Rouge Parish.
Rather, St. George organizers have retained veteran attorney Sheri Morris, currently the city attorney in Central, to represent them. Morris was instrumental in helping Central navigate its successful incorporation more than a decade ago. She went on to serve as Central’s city attorney from 2006-2016, a position to which she was reappointed in January. Â
She is managing partner in the Baton Rouge office of Daigle, Fisse and Kessenich, which also has offices in New Orleans and on the Northshore.
Morris says she cannot comment on a lawsuit that hasn’t yet been filed, but adds her client “has an excellent defense.”
In related developments, the Metro Council administrator’s office continues to field questions from property owners in the proposed St. George footprint about the rules governing annexation into the city of Baton Rouge, though no additional petitions have been filed since Monday.
St. George organizers say they, too, continue to get inquiries from neighborhoods wanting into their new city, though until the city is legally incorporated, it has no authority to annex property.
Some neighborhoods are also seeking information about how to get out of St. George without having to be annexed into the city of Baton Rouge. Metro Council member Matt Watson says he has been approached by one neighborhood with that inquiry and is trying to help them.
Assistant Parish Attorney Courtney Humphrey says the only legal recourse the neighborhood has is to wait for the city of St. George to be certified—provided it weathers the legal challenges—then petition for de-annexation, which, if granted, would put the neighborhood back in the unincorporated portion of East Baton Rouge Parish.
