With the recent retirement of Oak Park’s village attorney, Ray Heise, after more than 30 years on the job, village hall is taking a closer look at what it pays out on lawsuits and attorneys. Oak Park spent more than $800,000 on outside law firms last year, and trustees want to see if there are ways to pare those costs down.
The conversation got kick-started at a meeting last week, as three members of the village board met to take a closer look at how village hall runs its law department. The village board will eventually need to decide whether it wants to keep relying on staff attorneys, hiring outside legal counsel, or using some mix of the two, according to Village Manager Tom Barwin.
Trustee John Hedges called it “astounding” that Oak Park spent more than $800,000 last year on legal fees, and he thinks now is the perfect time to re-evaluate things.
“This is something that every organization should do when there’s a change, to step back and see if there’s a better way of doing this than we’ve been doing it,” Hedges said.
Altogether, Oak Park is currently embroiled in about 12 lawsuits and another dozen cases related to workers comp claims, according to Village Manager Tom Barwin. Village hall spent about $840,000 on outside legal help last year, along with another $494,000 for its in-house legal staff.
Barwin said the amount spent on outside lawyers is unusually high because of the lawsuit between village hall and Oak Park and River Forest High School. The case is complicated, he said, and requires lawyers that specialize in tax increment financing law.
This year, Oak Park is budgeting about $535,000 to spend on outside attorneys (not including the OPRF lawsuit), along with another $500,000 for legal staff.
Barwin and the three village board members on the “reinventing government committee” hope to put together a report on the current state of the legal department, to present to the full village board later this year.
Simone Boutet — who recently took over as acting village attorney after Ray Heise’s retirement — thinks the village is best served by using in-house attorneys. Staffers are needed to keep an eye on cases, to monitor costs, and outside attorneys are paid by the hour, whereas village attorneys are paid a set salary.
Boutet thinks the village would be best served by having a village attorney, along with two assistant attorneys to help handle more minor legal matters in-house, such as traffic court.