City measure allots $110K to pay lawyers

A month after approving a $4.7 million payment to settle two lawsuits filed by one current and two former Honolulu police officers who alleged discrimination, the Honolulu City Council is being asked to approve more money for attorneys’ fees.

Resolution 16-80 allows paying up to $110,000 more to the law firm Ayabe Chong Nishimoto Sia & Nakamura, hired to represent and defend the city as special counsel in the civil case, Sgt. Shermon Dean Dowkin et al. v. the City and County of Honolulu. That’s in addition to $250,000 the firm already is authorized to receive.

If the resolution is approved today, the Council will have authorized up to $885,000 to be divided among three separate law firms that represented the city and various other defendants in the Dowkin cases.

Chung & Ikehara is being paid up to $325,000, and Cary T. Tanaka up to $200,000.

The Council Executive Matters and Legal Affairs Committee last month gave preliminary approval to the latest amount.

Whether it’s now enough to pay off all the attorneys’ costs in the matter is unclear. The resolution before the Council today states the firm has billed the city $353,464.78 “and has indicated that additional funds are necessary.”

The original 2010 case by Dowkin, who is still on the force, and former officers Federico Delgadillo Jr. and Cassandra Bennett-Bagorio alleged racial and sexual discrimination. The three alleged their lives were placed in danger because Honolulu Police Department supervisors ordered their colleagues not to provide them backup during solo, nighttime traffic stops.

An ensuing 2013 lawsuit alleged a cover-up by HPD officers, the Department of Corporation Counsel and the Equal Opportunity Office.

As a result of the $4.7 million settlement approved by the Council last month, all claims against the city have been dropped, and there was no admission of liability on the part of the city.

But it appears that city officials expect to be paying for the services of other outside lawyers in the coming fiscal year.

In its budget for the upcoming fiscal 2017, the Caldwell administration is proposing $1.9 million for the Department of Corporation Counsel’s consultant services account — a 50 percent increase from the $1.3 million budgeted for this year.

Corporation Counsel Donna Leong, at a departmental briefing before the Council Budget Committee last month, said her agency already has exceeded the budgeted amount for this year by about $350,000 with three months remaining in the fiscal year.

The consultant services account pays for expert witnesses; attorneys with special expertise such as bankruptcy or bond law; and cases, like Dowkin, in which there are multiple defendants who are or were city employees and might have legal interests in conflict with the city or each other.

In such situations, Leong said, her office will typically represent the city itself while “all the other individual defendants have to retain special counsel.”

Leong cited a lawsuit filed against the city seeking to stop transit-related projects due to questionable Council votes as one such case, and an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging the way the city was conducting its sidewalk clearance sweeps as another.

She also alluded to the Dowkin case without naming it, as it was still pending litigation in early March.

“The increase is primarily because of these specialized cases that have come recently before us, especially this fiscal year, the complexity of the cases involved … just complex factual or legal issues, and we feel that that trend is likely to continue,” she said.

Councilman Trevor Ozawa, chairman of the EMLA Committee, said, “It’s common practice for the city to hire outside counsel who have the necessary expertise and resources to handle some of the more complicated cases.”

The Council has approved funding for outside counsel in cases involving litigation and expertise beyond the scope of Corporation Counsel, Ozawa said. “I believe that in these cases where such approval is granted, it’s the best use of taxpayer dollars and provides for a higher likelihood of success.”

However, he said, “it is my hope that in the future we can handle more cases in-house.”