A month, six weeks, or perhaps two months in the future, Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp can see an end to the morass involving County Attorney Rheubin Taylor’s employment.
That end may be hazy for county residents, Taylor and members of the Hamilton County Commission, but to the mayor it’s crystal clear.
“The path is pretty straightforward,” Wamp told Times Free Press editorial page editors in a conference call Thursday. “We want to let the process work itself out.”
The county mayor believes — regardless of the “fair share of ethical challenges” he says Taylor has had — that state law gives him the ability to fire the attorney, which he did on Oct. 14 but whose contract runs through 2025. He believes that will be confirmed without a trial within the next two months, and that will bring an end to Taylor’s lawsuit against him and to the issue itself.
“It’s worth sorting it out,” Wamp said, adding his intent is not to have a trial. “We want to let it be adjudicated.”
For now, the case is in the hands of Chancellor Jeffrey Atherton, who will hold a hearing — expected to be only administrative in nature — on the issue Monday.
In the meantime, Wamp wants the public to know county business hasn’t stopped because of what one commissioner at Wednesday’s commission meeting called a “clown show,” “asinine” and “a big waste.”
“It’s a small portion of the energy of the [day-to-day] operation,” the mayor said. “It’s one of 30 balls we have in the air.”
However, Wamp believes the issue is consuming the commission, which he said has “taken a lot of blowback.”
“It’s more personal to them than it is to us,” he said. “We’ve tried to lower the temperature.”
Commission members spent nearly an hour Wednesday discussing the legal expenses around the issue — which have reached more than $70,000 — and determined in a resolution amendment that the county would not pay the mayor’s legal fees in the case.
Wamp wasn’t worried about that, either, saying commissioners may have been confused about what they were voting for since “state law is clear that a mayor can appoint or retain counsel.”
Plus, he said, “a resolution does not make something so.” It must fit under state law. Most of the resolutions commission members have passed surrounding Taylor, he said, “are not permissible under state law.”
Wamp also said he isn’t worried about the optics of the issue or what people thought of him.
“I’m not consumed by the p.r. (public relations) of anything,” he said. “We have important work underway. People will have a very clear picture of that sooner than later, which gives me quite a bit of comfort. The public perception of this is more disruptive than it is.”
Nevertheless, he said, he understands there may be some public misunderstanding about “the important principle that underlies this” — the proper employment of a county attorney. “Everybody benefits from it being resolved. I want people to understand this is no fool’s errand. These are precise legal questions. We get through this, and we’re off to the races. We’re not going to stand in the way of [the commission’s] good ideas, and we don’t think they’re going to stand in the way of ours.”
Wamp further believes the issue hasn’t damaged his working relationship with the commission and, indeed, feels there are “some cracks in the wall” of previous unanimous votes in favor of Taylor.
“The ambiguity,” he said, “is around state law.”
Wamp said the votes of commission members — such as the confused one Wednesday in which they said they wouldn’t pay his legal fees — don’t offend him.
“We all have the responsibility to put our best foot forward,” he said. “[Commissioner David] Sharpe just has different values, but with the other 10” — now nine with the December resignation of state Rep. Greg Martin — “I have ongoing conversations.”
Sharpe, Wamp said, evidently was “engaging in a bit of political theater” in saying during the commission meeting the ethical charges the mayor made against Taylor had “been disproven. He’s a strong defender of Rheubin, but I don’t know a single thing [Taylor did] that has been disproven.”
Still, he said, “I’m not hung up on personalities, and I’m not going to engage in character attacks. I think with the vast majority we’ll agree on most things long-term.”
We have said all along that Taylor’s ethical challenges deserved scrutiny and that the county mayor should be able to have an ally in the county attorney with whom he works, but that the sticking point was a legal contract signed by the previous county commission.
Wamp said the issue is not keeping the county from doing its work involving education, job development and infrastructure, but we hope the settlement of the county attorney’s employment brings all of those into sharper focus.
And though the end of the Taylor quagmire may be hazy to some, Wamp’s sure it will be sooner rather than later.