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No one ever said the word extortion, but Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn wants the funding for legal services restored to the budget and the City Council wants answers when it comes to how that money has been and is currently being spent. And both refuse to act until the other gives them what they want.
It is a fight that is rolling into its eighth month and City Councilor Emily Lazzaro said she is all done talking about expenditures for the city’s Law Department as well as the back-and-forths with the mayor’s office. T
hat, however, didn’t stop council from debating how to move forward with the issue for almost two hours.
The City Council voted in August to reduce the budget for legal services to two months, a reaction to not having received information regarding legal costs and settlement the city’s incurred since 2020.
City Council President Zac Bears said the first request for information was made in February and was followed up by six more requests over the last seven months.
Lungo-Koehn has said, through a number of memo’s, that fulfilling the request is costly in both time and resources.
A second request from council was for an independent review of the city’s litigation costs which Lungo-Koehn said in an email on Aug. 31 that she would be open to the idea. It could cost the city approximately $10,000.
Lazzaro said she was not interested in spending money on an independent review.
“I don’t want to spend $10,000 of the city’s money on anything that isn’t protecting our vulnerable residents, supporting food security, helping people get housed, helping our roads get fixed, helping with, you know, the basic necessities of running the city,” she said.
Lazzaro said there is no need for some official to come in and tell them the legal aspect of the budget is a bad financial situation when they already know that.
“What I do want to point to is how can it be permitted for the mayor to say ‘you can’t have a city solicitor unless you give me X Y Z,’” she asked. “That’s an insane thing. It sounds to me like a quid pro quo.”
But she concedes that there doesn’t appear to be much the council can do because city structure paves the way for a strong-mayor city. She said they need to make taxpayers understand that choices such as spending money on outside legal aid rather than filling the city solicitor position, is the mayor’s choice.
“And we just have to know this is the mayor we have until the end of next year,” she said, referring to the 2027 mayoral election.
City Councilor George Scarpelli said he was beyond frustrated with the lack of information coming from the mayor’s office to the point where he will refuse to support or approve any requests from Lungo-Koehn’s office until the issue is settled.
He also said he’s done asking the mayor to provide the legal information requested – instead he said he plans to present a letter at council’s October meeting to be sent to Secretary of State William Galvin’s office asking him to demand council receive the legal expense breakdown it’s been asking for.
“We’ve given the city administration months and months to respond to this, but all we’re getting back is is negativity and the audacity to go public and say everything we’re talking about is all a political ploy between some sort of old boy network that we still don’t know who’s defining it, and the O.R.,” he said, referring to the political movement, Our Revolution.
In an Aug. 31 memo to the council, Lungo-Koehn said she believes the personal attacks against her are aimed at trying to ruin her character and question her integrity, “while someone positions for the first ever four-year mayoral term.”
Nina Nazarian, Lungo-Koehn’s chief of staff, admitted she too was tired of the conversations, but that the entire scenario the council painted, that using outside counsel is financially draining for the city, is not true.
Bears said it’s easy to see they have varying perspectives on the issue and asked Nazarian how she thought the city could move forward.
“What I know is that the mayor has presented that she would be prepared to move forward quickly with a posting of a position and recruitment once the Law Department funding is restored,” Nazarian said.
City Councilor Matt Leming called that bullying.
Unlike Lazzaro and Councilor Anna Callahan, Leming said he’s willing to see this fight through to a satisfactory conclusion.
“I think we’ve seen these sorts of bullying tactics before where the mayor will just kind of keep doing what she wants to do until the council caves, and I don’t really think that’s a good modus operandi for this body moving forward,” he said.
Leming said if Lungo-Koehn stonewalls the council by repeatedly saying requested tasks are too hard, and the council gives in, then she’ll just keep doing it, which is why “I’m perfectly fine with continuing along this route.”
And so will they. The council voted unanimously to bring several questions to the mayor and have Fire Chief Todd Evans appear before it at the next meeting in order to try and stave off a lawsuit, thus continuing the battle between City Hall and the City Council over legal fees.
