Last year, Bonneville County charged me $352 for electronic copies of court records. The Idaho Supreme Court has now unanimously agreed with me that those charges violated Idaho law.
The Court determined that the County Clerk was legally entitled to charge me only $21.33 and ordered a refund of $330.67. The Court also awarded me my costs. That should be the end of an unremarkable story about a $330 billing dispute. It isn’t.
Bonneville County paid the Nelson Hall Parry Tucker law firm $3,632 in outside attorney fees to defend the unlawful charges. Add the refund and $1,241.80 in court costs I am entitled to recover, and the identifiable cost to taxpayers exceeds $5,200.
And that understates the real cost. Bonneville County Deputy Prosecutor Randy Neal and his office handled the litigation, and Neal personally argued the case before the Idaho Supreme Court. None of the salaries, benefits, staff time or overhead of the County Prosecutor’s Office is included in that figure. These additional costs could easily run in excess of $20,000 in the private sector.
Such expenditures might be justified if this were an extraordinarily difficult case or the County were defending an important legal principle. The Supreme Court’s opinion suggests otherwise. The Court concluded that the County’s charges violated clear Idaho law. It was not exactly a jurisprudential Rubik’s Cube.
The Supreme Court even observed that Bonneville County did “not mount a robust defense” of the overcharges. The Court did the arithmetic itself: The lawful charge was $21.33. I had paid $352. So, the other $330.67 had to be returned.
One outside-counsel billing entry deserves particular scrutiny. Neal argued the case before the Supreme Court in Rexburg on June 10. Outside attorney Weston Davis attended and sat with Neal but did not argue. Davis had already billed 4.9 hours the previous two days helping Neal prepare for oral argument.
On June 10, Davis billed another 2.3 hours at $235 per hour, or $540.50. But the entry doesn’t say he charged for traveling to Rexburg or attending oral argument. Instead, it curiously states, “review issues for oral argument to summary of primary home base grounding principals for argument.” Say what? I’ve no idea what this means, and I’m a lawyer.
But the timeline raises an obvious question. Oral argument lasted about one hour, and round-trip travel between Idaho Falls and Rexburg takes roughly 1.3 hours, including time for on-campus parking. That totals almost exactly the 2.3 hours Davis billed that day.
If those 2.3 hours represented travel and attendance, why doesn’t the invoice just say so? And why did taxpayers need to pay an outside lawyer $235 per hour to travel to Rexburg and sit at counsel table when Neal argued the case and Davis had already billed nearly five hours helping him prepare? Perhaps there is an explanation. Taxpayers are entitled to hear it.
There is another question: Who reviewed this invoice before the County paid it? Whatever the June 10 description says, it doesn’t mention travel or attendance, even though Davis was in Rexburg that day. Yet, so far as I am aware, the County paid it without asking for clarification.
Somebody also decided that the County should fight all the way to the Supreme Court rather than refund $330.67. I sued then-County Clerk Penny Manning in her official capacity. It is difficult to believe litigation involving an elected County official, County attorneys, outside counsel and ultimately the Idaho Supreme Court proceeded without the knowledge of County Commissioners—one of whom is herself a lawyer and former judge. I don’t know precisely who authorized each decision. But somebody did, and as the bills mounted, somebody decided the fight should continue.
There is another reason this case matters. I am a lawyer. I could represent myself. Most citizens cannot.
Suppose an ordinary citizen receives the same $352 bill and believes the government overcharged him $330. What does he do—hire a lawyer? He would spend thousands to recover $330. Even if he were completely right, the economics would make no sense. So, he pays the overcharge.
There is an uncomfortable irony here. The County could spend thousands defending a $330 unlawful overcharge because the officials making the decisions weren’t spending their own money. The ordinary citizen would have to spend thousands of his own dollars to get $330 back. Most people simply wouldn’t do it.
So, the question remains: Why did County officials spend thousands in taxpayer dollars rather than return $330 that was clearly overcharged? And why did the County pay $540.50 for an unintelligible time entry on the same day the outside lawyer traveled to Rexburg and attended an oral argument presented by a County lawyer without any apparent need to be there?
Normal people would not spend thousands of dollars fighting over $330. Government officials should act like normal people when spending their taxpayer dollars.
