The attorney costs associated with the city-parish’s ongoing legal battle with former Parish Attorney Mary Roper have ballooned well beyond the $17,500 contract the Metro Council previously approved with attorney Murphy Foster III to represent it, leading the council to consider raising the contract limit to $50,000 at today’s meeting.
Dawn Guillot, who works in the Division of Administration of the Parish Attorney’s Office, tells Daily Report that her office has already processed $43,501 worth of invoices related to the Roper case. In addition to the cost of Foster’s contract, the city-parish has also had to foot the bill to fulfill arduous public records requests filed by Roper. Another nearly $5,000 has been spent to address and respond to those requests.
Foster and his firm have acted as an intermediary on the public records requests because it was a conflict for the Parish Attorney’s Office to handle the responses, Guillot says. In order to minimize outside council fees, Guillot says, she and another attorney in the office, Cyndi Bohrer, spent five days sifting through 35,000 emails, removing privileged information, to fill numerous requests filed in August for emails sent between Council Administrator Casey Cashio, Chief Administrative Officer William Daniel and several council members. Those emails were then passed to Foster’s firm to be produced to Roper. See copies of the requests. [link to pdf]
Interim Information Services Director Eric Romero and the systems administrator produced the emails for the Parish Attorney’s Office, which required 30 hours of work. Romero and the systems administrator spent an additional eight hours on a bulkier request filed after Roper was dismissed in September for all of the emails sent to or from her account since 1993. That search produced 99,000 emails. Bohrer spent a day beginning to sift through them before the matter was turned over to Foster. Guillot says it would have taken her office three times longer to process that request than the one in August.
The council dismissed Roper in September at a contentious hearing that strayed from its initial procedural outline. Roper has already unsuccessfully sued the council regarding her termination. On Monday, she appealed a ruling by Judge Michael Caldwell that gave the council leeway to dismiss her, and she also filed a second suit against the city-parish, alleging that it has failed to fill her public records requests. The Metro Council will convene at 4 p.m. today on the third floor of City Hall, 222 St. Louis St. See the full agenda.
—Kelly Connelly
