City Attorney Admits His Lawsuit Explanation Wasn't the Best
Mistakenly Described Huntley Case as an 'Attack' on a Green Cove Ordinance
City Attorney Jim Arnold admits having been a wee bit imprecise in his recent statements to the Green Cove City Council about a lawsuit against the city. The council has been debating whether to keep fighting the suit filed by landowner Wade Huntley or just pay him back the money Huntley says he is owned.
“I could have chosen my words better. I’ll give you that,” Arnold said yesterday in a phone call with Clay News & Views.
Huntley sued the city in September, alleging that he being charged an annual $94,600 stormwater fee unlawfully. It was unlawful, according to the lawsuit, because his property is not connected to the city’s stormwater system and never has been.
Speaking to the council at its January 6 meeting, Arnold referred to the suit as an “attack” on city ordinances. Here’s part of what he said (emphasis added):
A City Council passed an ordinance, and we’re going to defend those ordinances. They are under Florida law presumptively valid. You start with that.
That doesn’t mean that if you have an ordinance it’s clearly unlawful or unconstitutional or, you know, violates the charter or something of that sort that it can’t be invalidated. It can either partially or wholly it could be invalidated, but I don’t take the complaint and the assertions made by Mr. Scruby (Huntley’s local lawyer), just reading those, saying well…they’ve said we must have an invalid ordinance. I don’t accept that.
Reading the language of Huntley’s complaint, however, reveals no challenge to city ordinances whatsoever. In fact, Huntley’s lawyers quote the ordinance to support his case. His lawyers are arguing that the City of Green Cove Springs had failed to obey its own ordinance when it charged him a stormwater fee. They did not claim there was anything wrong with the ordinance.
“I look back at my verbiage I could see how someone could look back at my verbiage and hear that he’s just talking about the ordinance and not the application,” Arnold said yesterday. “I grant you the application of the ordinance is what their main legal beef is. They’re saying we’re not applying it equitably and legally across the board.”
The distinction matters because there’s a disagreement about how to proceed. Arnold and Councilor Ed Gaw, his leading supporter on the Council, want to keep fighting the lawsuit pending a review and possible revision of the ordinance in March with the help of a utilities consultant.
Meanwhile, Councilor Darren Stutts says the issue is not about how the ordinance should be rewritten in the future. He said it’s about an injustice done to a single individual over the past three years under an ordinance as now written. Stutts has repeatedly said the lawsuit should be settled immediately, and the city should repay the man all the money unfairly collected from him.
Shifting the focus of the debate from an individual injustice to some kind of systemic flaw could be interpreted as a classic “red herring” distraction.
Let’s say the dispute were about a retail transaction in which “cash register” is an analogy for “ordinance.” Would it matter if the cash register needed a software update, if a cashier has shortchanged someone by not using the cash register incorrectly in the first place?
Stutts also questioned the council’s decision last month to allocate $10,000 to a $300-an-hour law firm in Tallahasee to fight the Huntley suit. Stutts said he will vote against a motion at tonight’s meeting to set aside another $25,000 for the outside lawyers keep up the fight, even though there are settlement talks underway.
Arnold explained reasoning behind the dual approach during his discussion with the Council on January 6. “So (the city’s answer was) filed on our behalf in the Huntley lawsuit,” he said. “That's exactly what lawyers, good lawyers do. They file. You have to file a response. They filed the lawsuit. We had to file a response.”
Florida civil litigation rules do require a defendant to respond to a lawsuit within 20 days of being served notice of the case, but there’s a way around it. Under Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, the city could have asked the court for an extension of time to file an answer while the parties engaged in settlement talks. Such motions are usually granted if attorneys for the other side do not object.
Arnold yesterday rejected that scenario, saying it represented an oversimplistic and naive view of the 21st century legal system hereabouts. He also said the additional $25,000 should be enough to tide the city through to a settlement with Huntley.
Thank goodness for Stutts. He’s not even a lawyer and he understands the situation better than the rest.
If this report about City Attorney Arnold’s responses is accurate, it would seem that he is suffering from some kind of mental decline.