The Jackson city attorney’s office has been in communication with State Auditor Shad White over concerns that the City Council hiring its own attorney in its garbage fight with the mayor constitutes unauthorized expenditures, according to an email sent from City Attorney Catoria Martin to members of the Council and administration, which was obtained by the Clarion Ledger.
A spokesperson for White said Friday that the office does not comment on open investigations, nor does it confirm or rule out possible subjects of its investigations.
This comes as the council and the mayor are headed to court. The council is awaiting a hearing Monday morning in Hinds County Chancery Court, in a case between it and Major Chokwe Antar Lumumba. If the ruling goes the council’s way, it can allow it to negotiate its own contract. Currently, by law, the mayor is the only one in the city who can negotiate a contract.
It’s unclear whether this memorandum would have an effect on those legal proceedings.
Meanwhile, Jackson residents have now gone two weeks since their garbage was last collected, and some have turned to paying private companies to haul their trash away, even as bills from the city continue.
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Martin, a member of the city administration, said in the Friday email to city leaders that White’s office reached out to her on April 5 “regarding expenditures for legal services for attorneys hired by the City Council.”
“Since April 5th, we have received daily requests for additional information and for updates on the information previously provided,” Martin said. “As a result of this request, I asked our litigation department to prepare the attached memo where they researched the authority of governing authorities to hire outside counsel and the potential personal liability for unauthorized expenditures of public funds.”
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The memo cited four occasions between 1999 and 2007 where the Jackson City Council asked the state’s attorney general whether it could hire its own legal counsel.
“Every time, the Attorney General has stated that the City Council may not do so,” the memo reads.
Whether the mayor has a right to hire counsel, as Lumumba has said in response to the Council’s attorneys suing him, is also thrown into question by the memo. Lumumba has repeatedly said he has a right to defend himself when the Council files suit against him. That said, the memo indicates that neither a mayor nor a council should be able to hire outside counsel to represent themselves, stating they can only do so when they agree one is needed to represent the city government as a whole.
“The plain language of the statute indicates that only the “governing authorities” can retain attorneys. In other words, the major and a majority of the council must both agree before a municipality can hire legal counsel,” the memo reads.
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The memo cited four occasions between 1999 and 2007 where the Jackson City Council asked the state’s attorney general whether it could hire its own legal counsel.
That said, it also indicates that if a mayor is facing a lawsuit and a council refuses to provide funding for legal counsel, the mayor can hire attorneys, but who takes at the cost of said counsel should be decided in court.
“In the event that the payment is not authorized by the city council, the mayor may act to employ his own counsel, and any resolution of the payment of the expenses of the defense would necessarily be a matter left to the discretion of the Court, ” the memo reads, quoting a 2006 attorney general’s opinion.
Ultimately, the memo recommends that both the Council and Lumumba stop hiring and paying independent attorneys.
“This Office believes that the growing practice of both the City Council and the Mayor hiring attorneys and paying them with public funds to sue each other or to ‘intervene’ in City actions where the City Attorney is providing representation to the City has no legal basis , whether statutory or otherwise. The practice is also harmful to the City’s governance and finances,” the memo reads.
The memo further stated that public officials can be held both civilly and criminally liable for unauthorized expenditures, particularly in this case, considering the city has depleted nearly all of its legal budget.
According to previous Clarion Ledger reporting, the City has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from its budget to pay for lawyers in the legal battles between the council and the mayor.
According to documents obtained by the Clarion Ledger via a Freedom of Information request, the City of Jackson paid more than $154,000 to a local law firm between May and December of last year. That number only accounts for the legal costs incurred by the mayor in the lawsuit, and documents did not include any invoices for the first four months of 2023. During an emergency council meeting Monday, councilmembers were told that they had spent $200,228 on attorney fees.
A spokesperson for Lumumba declined to comment for this story. City Council President Ashby Foote did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.