Troy mayor, council divided on city attorney
With only $19,500 budgeted for the
position, the opening for Troy city attorney isn’t expected to
attract many candidates.
Applications are due Friday, but the
divided mayor and city council each have in mind candidates they’d
like to hire – a fact that will most-likely create a stir at the
council meeting next Wednesday.
Mayor Don Banning has spoken with
incoming Libby city attorney Jim Reintsma about taking on the job
for both cities. The Troy council, however, favors outgoing Libby
city attorney Heather McDougall.
“We are opposed to sharing a lawyer
with Libby,” said councilmember Gary Rose. “We’re not interested in
that, especially if Heather has given up her position in Libby and
she is available.”
The mayor must appoint an attorney with
the consent of the council and, as of Wednesday, they hadn’t
discussed the issue with each other. If the two sides can’t come to
an agreement, the city may go into the new year without a
prosecutor or civil counsel.
The mayor said he plans to look through
all the applications Friday and perform interviews with a committee
in hopes of presenting his choice at next week’s meeting. As of
Tuesday he hadn’t organized a committee, but he said he had no
plans to invite members of the council to join.
“I’ll put it to the council Wednesday
night and see if they approve my selection,” he said.
Reintsma and members of the council
have been in contact with each other, according to councilmember
Fran McCully, but members believe that his caseload in Libby would
be too big to share with Troy. Rose said he questions the amount of
coverage Troy would get.
“We feel that beings Heather lives here
we’d have more access to counsel,” he said. “We’d have something
that the council could use. It seems like right now the mayor has
counsel and the council does not.”
McDougall served one year with the City
of Libby and has a private practice in Troy. She has been a vocal
Banning opponent who has taken on the role of Troy City Council’s
informal counsel as they’ve taken actions to restrict the mayor’s
power.
When longtime Troy city attorney Mark
Fennessy announced three months ago that he would resign at the end
of the year, The Western News asked McDougall if she had plans to
apply.
“If I were asked, I’d consider it,” she
said in September. “I can’t imagine Don agreeing to it after some
of the things I’ve done.”
Reintsma has experience in civil and
criminal law and has served both as a defense and prosecuting
attorney at the district court level.
Libby Mayor Doug Roll expects that he
will spend an average of 20-25 hours per week as a criminal
prosecutor, and a widely varying number of hours as the city’s
civil counsel.
“The prosecutorial stuff is what takes
so long. The civil part is not so bad,” Roll said. “The civil
varies – it just depends on what we’re doing and what advice we
need.”
The City of Troy pulls in a minimal
number of criminal cases for prosecution, but the rift between
council and mayor will put more hours on the future city attorney’s
plate.
Roll believes McDougall is too
emotionally involved in the City of Troy’s issues and is too
adversarial toward Banning to be an effective city attorney. Rose
argues that if McDougall were offered the position, she would
change her behavior at council meetings.
“I think if Heather gets in there,
she’ll act in a totally professional way,” he said, adding that as
just a local resident, she lets her personal opinions “rain
down.”
The cities of Libby and Troy have
shared attorneys in the past, being able to collectively offer
enough money to attract good candidates.
Reintsma agreed to leave his public
defender position for the City of Libby with a $13,000 pay cut,
Roll said, with hopes up picking up more income as Troy’s
attorney.