To say the more than two-hour meeting of the Hamilton County Commission this week was a head-shaking crash course in “dysfunctional” would be great understatement.
In fact, “dysfunctional” was a word used several times by the commissioners. But they used it in a mocking way when talking about a letter sent to them the day before the meeting. What they didn’t seem to understand was that their protestations of it put the “dysfunctional” spotlight most brightly on each of them. But we get ahead of ourselves.
As anyone might have guessed, once again we’re talking about the “soap opera” we call our county government these days. And right at the heart of that “middle school” boys club better known as our 11-member county commission is the county attorney, Rheubin Taylor.
We’ll try to cover recent history in short sentences.
New Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp offered Taylor retirement but he refused, prompting Wamp in mid- October to fire the 29-year county attorney who knows every courthouse secret there is. Taylor rallied county commissioners to his defense and they un-fired him, passing resolutions forcing Wamp to reinstate him, return computer access to him and give him back pay.
Last week, Taylor called Chattanooga permitters to report that the mayor was having a temporary handicapped access ramp built to the courthouse lawn for a Christmas tree lighting without a permit. Wamp’s office released a county auditor’s report pointing out that Taylor had not followed procurement rules as required by county policy — much of which he wrote himself — to obtain outside legal services for amounts over $25,000.
That catches us up to what our commissioners themselves termed this week’s “soap opera,” “witch hunt,” “middle-school stuff” and “dysfunctional” county commission meeting.
First off, let’s be clear that as county attorney, Taylor is expected to be the attorney for the county commission, the county mayor, his administration and county employees working in their official job capacities. But Taylor also has a longstanding contract that allows him to handle non-conflicting and reasonable private law cases. Reasonable seeming to mean he could handle private cases but not so much so that they interfered with or conflicted with his $180,000 a year full-time county work.
Yet since Jan. 1, 2017, he has worked on at least 80 cases in Hamilton County probate court as the private attorney of record, according to public records obtained by the TFP. That averages out to about 16 cases a year, and one of the clients in one of the probate cases was former Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger — who, by the way, signed Taylor’s most recently renewed contracts.
Meanwhile, the county attorney’s office, despite yearly budget increases from $889,500 in fiscal 2017 to more than $1.5 million in 2022, has gone hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget in the past three fiscal years.
That overbudget amount would seem to have come about in part due to $1.8 million in expenses between 2020 and November of this year. According to the county auditor’s review, those expenses were the outside counsel costs approved solely by Taylor with no signoff from commissioners or the mayor.
Ask yourselves why the county attorney, whose job it is to instruct commissioners that they must approve procurement of items and professional services over $25,000, didn’t do this for what he himself spent and oversaw.
Here’s Taylor’s version: “For 29 years, I have entered into contracts with outside counsel as my contract with the county allows me to do. … “I don’t pay the bills. [The finance department] pays the bills. … For 29 years, that’s the process we have followed. Finance has paid those invoices that I have approved and auditing has approved the whole process …”
He is paid to know county policy — even to write county policy. Surely he knows he’s been breaking it “for 29 years.”
But commissioners? They followed Taylor’s lead and blamed everyone else, questioning why the finance department didn’t flag it to them and why the audit was done in the first place.
And they fell back, of course, on blaming the new mayor and his office.
Commissioner Greg Beck, D-North Brainerd, ridiculed a comment Wamp’s interim chief of staff, Claire McVay, made in an email to commissioners on Tuesday. McVay said the chain of events was indicative of a “dysfunctional work environment that the county attorney has created” for the mayor and administrators.
With dripping sarcasm, Beck said: “You know what that says to people in this county? That we have a man in here that we’re supporting [Taylor] that’s wreaking havoc across this whole government. Mr. Chairman, I don’t think that’s true.”
Commissioner David Sharpe, D-Red Bank, blamed Wamp because he hasn’t been at the commission legal committee meetings.
“Maybe if he’d stop hauling around to Chattanooga State and the Board of Regents and everything else and focus on county government, we wouldn’t have to deal with this mess,” Sharpe said.
Maybe the commission wouldn’t have to deal with this mess of unapproved legal fees if it would deal with its mess of the past 29 years.
No, commissioners. It’s not fair to call your squabbling “middle school.”
Middle schoolers are smarter than this.