Tue
Mar 6 2007
01:34 pm
McElroy v. Knox County Commission update
By: R. Neal

Jack McElroy has an update on the KNS lawsuit. He says he hears through informal channels that County Commission might like to settle. McElroy says the KNS is pressing on and discovery will commence any day now.

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Tamara Shepherd's picture

Does Owings want to fight it?

Submitted by Tamara Shepherd on Tue, 2007/03/06 - 2:35pm.

You know, Randy, I still find Owing's very first comments at that 2/20 Intergovernmental Committee meeting awfully revealing.

Per the N-S, the first words out of his mouth were: "What we're talking about is a very serious legal matter and a matter that may be the most important legal matter in the history of this commission," then, per the same story, Owings "offered five reasons to settle."

I've been watching him closely, and I don't think he particularly cares to fight this thing. Anybody else get that impression?

KTB's picture

Tamara, I had the same

Submitted by KTB on Tue, 2007/03/06 - 2:50pm.

Tamara,

I had the same feeling from watching his initial remarks on the lawsuit. The latter statements he made seemed neutral.

KTB

Tamara Shepherd's picture

Why apparent hesitance?

Submitted by Tamara Shepherd on Tue, 2007/03/06 - 4:48pm.

*If* Owings is hesitant to fight it, it's particularly notable, because he has the upper hand WRT staff.

It occurs to me that Law Director Owings theoretically has the ability to put 8 or 10 attorneys to work on the defense, and work them all 70 hours a week, if he chooses, with no concern that doing so will bankrupt his client. I mean, Knox County will pay the law department's attorneys the same salaries they paid them in January, and whether or not every attorney is on this case.

I wouldn't think McElroy could put 8 or 10 attorneys on the task, though, unless maybe the N-S's pockets are deeper than I realize.

So, what could Owings's *apparent* hesitance mean, except that he'd rather not take on this dawg?

Johnny Ringo's picture

You might want to consider

Submitted by Johnny Ringo on Tue, 2007/03/06 - 10:32pm.

You might want to consider that the county law department has hundreds if not thousands of other lawsuits to contend with. Its not really realistic to say that Owings could put his entire staff on this one case.

Tamara Shepherd's picture

OK, Johnny

Submitted by Tamara Shepherd on Tue, 2007/03/06 - 11:43pm.

If that's the case, Johnny, I'm relieved to learn it--at least WRT the prospects for the N-S suit.

I had imagined, though, that litigation pending against local government would be something citizens would know about. Have I missed something, or is there some other explanation for why I wouldn't have known this? (Be kind, please--that wasn't an invitation to ridicule ;-)

Johnny Ringo's picture

It's not a secret

Submitted by Johnny Ringo on Wed, 2007/03/07 - 7:12am.

Knox County is essentially a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and hundreds of vehicles on the road every day. As with any large corporation, litigation is a fact of life - liability lawsuits over county-vehicle involved MVAs, liability lawsuits based on the condition of roads or other public properties, worker's compensation litigation, unemployment litigation, litigation over administrative decisions like the granting of beer licenses or zoning variances, breach of contract actions and civil rights lawsuits filed by inmates of the jails and by persons arrested by the Sheriff's department. It's not unusual stuff, but it is prevalent and very time consuming.

On top of that you have the myriad of contracts the county enters into, each of which must be drafted or at least reviewed by the law department. And every board, agency, commission, etc of county government likes to have a representative from the law department there to advise, and that's a LOT of meetings.

Then there's the stuff you don't see much that also takes up enormous amounts of time - school disciplinary hearings, teacher disciplinary hearings, "due process" hearings under the IDEA (the law department has one attorney who essentially devotes all of her time just to those, and she's very, very busy.)

So it's not like you have a group of pitbulls sitting in the law department waiting to form some legal hit squad when a high-profile lawsuit is filed. The county law department has very limited resources (I think the law department budget is around .25% of the county budget), and yet has huge and wide-ranging responsibilities. Most of those responsibilities, however, never make the news. They aren't secret - they are just ordinary, bread and butter issues that any large organization has to face. And because they are there all the time, it means that Owings cannot pull all of the lawyers in the office off everything else they are doing and devote 100% of their time to the NS lawsuit. It would be unnecessary in any case, but also highly impractical.

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