Fulshear City Council Meeting 8/18/2015, FULSHEAR EXCESSIVE ATTORNEY CHARGES

EXCESSIVE USE OF CITY ATTORNEY SERVICES BY CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS, CITY COUNCIL PUBLIC MEETING, JULY 2015:

Elected officials spending taxpayers money to ban citizen from recording public meetings, amongst other things.

Mayor addressed during the meeting city council members should run their question through city administrator initially, if 2 or 3 members have same question it can be combined to cut down legal charges. I have to admit I was astonished to hear how much we as taxpayers had to pay for attorney fees just for month of July. The total legal fees for the whole previous fiscal year were $127,201. The legal fees for July were $33,011. Through an open records request, I obtained July invoices and I analyzed 1 invoice for $17,545.

I found that 1 day after I posted my previous video of the pedicab discussion on youtube, one councilwomen Tristan made an inquiry about the legality of posting public meetings on web. We paid for total of 3 inquiries in total questioning public information being public.

One Councilmember had seven inquiries. Three of them were related to making video public, three related to employee termination, and one about AED.

Of the 111 requests made by Council members and City employees to the City attorney, councilwomen Mesic requested his assistance 21 times, even on July 4th. That is 19% of all inquiries for this invoice and same amount inquires that the remaining of all of the five council members made combined (also 19%).

Our city should not be spending this kind of money when answers can be found elsewhere (The experienced admin or internet example: TX Open Meeting act and handbook that is posted on TX attorney general website).