The list of Hamilton County Attorney Rheubin Taylor’s outside-of-county-business estate cases can’t help but have cost us poor county taxpayers extra money — and with the full acceptance of Hamilton County Commissioners.
Increasingly, it appears our 11 county commissioners aren’t just good with this county employee’s outside work — they’re even willing to make us taxpayers expend still more to allow it to continue.
Let’s review.
On Monday, the Chattanooga Times Free Press revealed that since Jan. 1, 2017, Taylor — who we pay $180,420 a year to do the county’s legal business — has worked on at least 80 cases in probate court as a private lawyer, according to public records obtained by the paper through a Freedom of Information request.
Top of mind among those 80 cases was the estate of Laura Dell Coppinger, mother of former Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger, who died leaving her estate to her four sons.
Court documents indicate Taylor received $1,000 from the Coppingers for his work on their mother’s estate.
Those court filings, signed by Taylor, list his office number at the Hamilton County Courthouse, the phone number for the Hamilton County Attorney’s Office and his county email — indicating he was using public resources on the private matter.
Put another way, we’re paying his private office overhead with our public dollars. Even as he makes public and private dollars.
Aside from an obvious Coppinger/Taylor conflict, does anyone see any other conflicts here?
Taylor’s outside work was cited as part of new County Mayor Weston Wamp’s justification for attempting to fire Taylor in October.
But our county commissioners said no, no, no! And they pointed to a clause in Taylor’s contract — one the commission has approved over and over through the years — that allows him to work with outside clients.
Can you hear the mantra? It’s been that way for years. We’ve always done it this way.
Say what? Readers, are you feeling good about your county property tax rate right now?
Multiply this potential for conflicts — people and money — by at least 80 other cases.
But perhaps more importantly, multiply it by the inefficiencies it causes and what that means for our wallets.
The budget for the County Attorney’s Office has grown from $889,500 in fiscal year 2017 to more than $1.5 million in 2022, according to numbers provided by Wamp.
Despite that boost, the office has gone hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget — yes, over budget — in the past three fiscal years: $333,700 in 2022, $584,300 in 2021 and $241,800 in 2020.
Part of that is because the county attorney’s office has hired outside counsel for some cases — all while the county attorney handled his own private probate caseload.
None of this is meant to dismiss Taylor’s or anyone’s drive to make more money with a second job. Wamp acknowledges as much:
“I’m all for a guy who works at the highway department who at night runs a woodworking operation to make a little extra money. Good for him,” Wamp says. “If the sheriff in the middle of the workday was running a private security operation, that would not be good.”
That would seem to be what Taylor is doing with the County Attorney’s office. And it’s not only inefficient for taxpayers, it’s also inefficient for county business.
Employees see the county attorney’s office as “the place things go to die,” Wamp told the TFP, and it’s “not a well-kept secret.”
He said he was recently at the Medical Examiner’s Office and learned there are bodies in a refrigerated trailer out back, including some that had been there as long as six months. What was the holdup, he said he asked.
“Paper in the county attorney’s office,” he said he was told.
Yet all 11 members of the county commission have bucked the new mayor’s plan to terminate the contract of Rheubin Taylor and go a different — hopefully far less conflicted — direction with the county attorney’s office.
The commission voted to keep Taylor on, not once, but twice, doubling down on that decision when they overrode Wamp’s veto of their first effort.
The commission hired an outside attorney themselves, adding at least $10,000 to our tab, and more than one commissioner has warned the matter will wind up in court. Meanwhile, Taylor has sued Wamp, and last week a county chancery judge approved Taylor’s request for a temporary restraining order.
We’ve noted already that no judge in Hamilton County should be ruling on these matters. We’ve also already noted the absurd power struggle playing out as our commissioners pound their chests and try to put a collective thumb on the new mayor.
What remains now to be seen is how long you readers and taxpayers will let these commissioners pretend they don’t see a problem with a contract they’ve approved over and over for three decades to let a county employee ignore his day job to make money on the side while we pay him and his office overhead.
Give your commissioner a call. Tell him you expected more of him. Insist he find some face-saving way to right this wrong.