November 10, 2018

City Council Approves Paying $6.7 Million to Turner’s Former Law Partner

City Council Approves Paying $6.7 Million to Turner’s Former Law Partner

Yesterday, on an 11-4 vote, Houston City Council approved a $35 million contract for outreach to Harvey victims that included $6.7 million set aside for legal fees to Barnes & Associates, formerly Barnes & Turner.  To put that number in some perspective, it is a little less than half the annual budget for the City’s entire legal department, which  has 116 employees.*  According to its website, Barnes & Associates has four lawyers.**

Here is how the Council Members voted:

We know that the roughly $1 billion in relief funds the City will receive will be woefully inadequate to meet all the needs of those who did not have flood insurance or other resources with which they could repair their homes.  Every dollar the City spends on administrative costs is one less dollar that will actually go to help someone with their repairs.

Outreach is an important component to our recovery.  But this function could have been done at a fraction of this cost, and certainly without spending $6.7 million on legal fees.

* [Click here for City Legal Department Budget]

**  [Click here for Barnes & Associates personnel listing]

back to blogs

Related Blogs

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

X

Get Bill King's blog delivered to your inbox!