Over my objections, the BoE voted 3-2 to sponsor a bill that would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for non-wealthy taxpayers to sue the government. The back story to this is the BoE recently lost a case in Superior Court. The judge awarded attorney’s fees to the plaintiffs because the Board’s position was so unreasonable the judge ruled the case involved the enforcement of an important right affecting the public interest. The judge ruled the BoE must pay the plaintiff 1.5 times a reasonable fee, which he found in this case is more than $600,000. Before it got to this point I repeatedly argued we needed to settle the case, but the Board’s Democratic majority would only listen to the flawed legal advice we were getting from our legal department.
On Tuesday, the same lawyers who previously insisted we fight this case brought before the Board a bill idea to eliminate the current system for recovering costs and replace it with an exclusive standard that raises the bar so high for fee recovery that it will preclude non-wealthy taxpayers from bringing actions against the Board. Attorneys will not be willing to take a case for a regular taxpayer if the threshold for eventually recovering costs is so high it is not worth taking the risk.
In cases of unlawfully enacted taxes and fees the amount in dispute might be very small, but the cost of going up against the government could easily include many years of work for attorneys, as it did in the case the Board recently lost. That case took more than 10 years of internal appeals and litigation.
I am fairly confident this bill will get killed quickly because it is so offensive and wrong to so many. It is embarrassing to see it even get that far. My thanks to the California Consumer Attorneys Association and the California Taxpayers Association for standing up to the Board against this bad idea. An edited video of the discussion is below:
June 16th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Bill,
Thank you for preserving the public’s interest in lawsuits against overbearing governmental agencies.
You may want to support a bill to make it possible for the plaintiffs to recover their expert fees in such private attorney general actions. The California Consumer Attorneys Association (and numerous other groups) supported the bill SB1113 to preserve this important right in the 2009 legislative session. The bill passed both houses handily. However, Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed it at the behest of the California Chamber of Commerce as a “job killer” bill.
For full disclosure, the reason for the bill is a California Supreme Court case Olson versus Automobile Club of Southern California which outlawed such payments of reasonable expert fees in meritorious lawsuits. I and others had successfully sued the Auto Club over its patently unreasonable election procedures for directors. We won for the 3.5 million member-owners, and were awarded attorney fees and costs, but were saddled with unreimbursed $80,000 in expert fees.
Time to even up the match between the public and major offenders.