This appeared in the Standard Times today. Windwise should be ashamed of themselves! The same selectman who went on a witch hunt for this group to remove Crotty, in turn went and used town counsel without the chairmans approval to the tune of 2000.00 bucks. Windwise will never stop costing this town money. If you support them you are supporting higher taxes and less services. No wonder why Espindola would like for you to pay a fee to dispose of your trash. Over and above the taxes we already pay! This group and their supporters would bankrupt the town to punish the citizens who voted for the turbines. Sad, sad group of people! FAIRHAVEN — Fairhaven is once again at risk of running over its budget for legal spending, this time thanks to a lawsuit involving the town’s wind turbines. In fiscal year 2013, Fairhaven had budgeted $135,000 for legal expenses, which it exceeded by roughly $10,000. Now, history is set to repeat itself for fiscal 2014, according to Selectman Geoffrey Haworth. “The legal budget is being exhausted,”he said. Haworth said he expects the town will spend at least $10,000 over its $130,000 budgeted for legal fees. In the first five months of fiscal 2014, Fairhaven spent $59,000 on legal fees, meaning it could spend about $10,000 per month for the rest of the year to stay on budget. That’s not something that’s likely to happen given the status of ongoing litigation against the town. Haworth said the town has spent close to $18,000 in each of the last two months on legal fees. In November alone, $9,000 was spent on a single lawsuit filed by turbine neighbors against the Board of Appeals involving a change in the lots upon which the turbines were built. Town Counsel Thomas Crotty said he expects to spend more time on that lawsuit in the coming months, with a hearing scheduled in February and a trial date set for March. “That’s what happens when you get sued,” Crotty said. “It’s the litigation that drives the cost of the legal fees. If you get dragged into court, there’s not much you can do to control it.” The turbine lawsuit is just one of three the town is dealing with right now, but it is the only suit in which the town is the defendant. It is also one Crotty said is not likely be settled out of court, meaning for the first time in about 10 years, Fairhaven could have “a major case with a real trial” on its hands, Crotty said. The last case like that was one involving the sewage treatment plant on West Island, which Fairhaven won after spending more than $100,000. “When the wind power case is done, that will be a drop in the billings. We’ll be back to normal,”Crotty said. But it’s not all about the turbine case. In November, when selectmen voted to keep Crotty, they also decided to require town officials to get the board’s approval before using town counsel because they were worried about overspending. “As long as the procedure is followed hopefully we can keep a good eye on spending,”Selectmen Chairman Charlie Murphy said. “We’re just keeping an eye on things.” Around the same time the selectmen adopted that policy, they also voted to keep Crotty as town counsel after interviewing two candidates who would have charged less. Crotty’s fee is $160 per hour. Joseph Michaud, of Dartmouth, would have charged $150 per hour and Boston-based Kopelman and Paige offered to cap its fee at $125,000 annually. Haworth said he did not regret sticking with Crotty, saying he doubted that Kopelman and Paige would have kept their cap in years to come. “When we overran this year they would have raised it,” he said. “We just need to be more conscious of when we use town counsel.”
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:34:19 +0000