Chattanooga’s city government initiated a legal services arrangement nearly half a century ago that allowed a prominent local attorney to share the city’s legal work with his partners and to practice law privately for other clients on the side. The potential for conflicts-of-interest was subsequently dismissed by a string of mayors in favor of retaining an independent attorney who was not technically a city employee and who could be paid by the case, and not by the year. Though the city ended the terms of this long standing arrangement last November, finally making city employees of the current attorney and his staff, the old arrangement came under fire last week in a scorching opinion by the state Comptroller’s office.
The Comptroller’s staff attorney, Chadic W. Jackson, claimed in a letter to City Auditor Stan Seawall that the prior arrangement violated state law and that current city attorney Mike McMahan could be charged with fraud for having used city funds to pay part of his office and staff costs before the arrangement was stopped.
Mr. Jackson’s assessment may be technically correct. But even if it is, his judgment of Mr. McMahan’s role is excessively harsh. Given an arrangement that continued nearly 47 years under terms explicitly acknowledged and condoned by top city officials, there hardly seems grounds to consider the arrangement fraudulent.
It was not considered fraud when the city contracted with former city attorney Gene Collins in 1963 to work under those terms. Former Mayor Robert Kirk Walker, an esteemed lawyer himself, for example, was among the several mayors who repeatedly blessed the arrangement.
When Mr. Collins retired in 1990, the same year the former five-member City Commission gave way to the current nine-member City Council, the new Council continued the practice, promoting Randall Nelson, a member of Mr. Collins’ firm, to the job under the then existing terms.