In response to information requests from FOLF and from City Council
Updated 11/25/07
The City's actual surrender agreement
The attorney for the anti-dog group, Susan Brandt-Hawley, totally failed to in her real goal of eliminating people with off-leash dogs, but she "won" her case because the City was ordered to set aside the adoption of a new general plan document. She demanded about $250,000 in legal fees from the City of Santa Cruz! In a quirk of the law, cash-hungry attorneys can get not only a high fee for every hour they and their staff spend of a case, but they may also get a "multiplier" if their case was risky or they took the case on a contingency basis. This means an already huge fee can conceivably be doubled or tripled which is how fee claims can be pushed to astronomical levels.
This threat motivated the City to surrender off-leash recreation if the fee was reduced to $80,000 and State Parks agreed to pick up $35,000 of that amount. (See here for the documentation of the final settlement)
The City Attorney gives his explanation of what happened
On November 20, City Council asked City Attorney John Barisone for his explanation of events leading up to the decision to sacrifice off-leash recreation. Councilmember Coonerty provided us with a copy his memo.
He confirms that State Parks General Counsel Bradly Torgan was pushing behind the scenes for a no-dogs-off-leash policy. Barisone takes a very different spin on why things were done. We are concerned about several of his statements:
- Barisone continues to imply that the court decision required the elimination of off-leash recreation. This is not correct. As Bradly Torgan said, the court's decision "... does not provide plaintiff [the anti-dog group] with a policy of no dogs off leash..." No court has ever ordered the end of off-leash recreation. Council is receiving bad advice on this issue.
- He says that he only ghost-wrote Torgan's October 26 letter (in which Torgan tells the City to terminate off-leash recreation by Nov. 15, 2007) because Torgan had too little time to write it himself. He further defends this sequence of events by noting that the letter Torgan finally sent was not exactly identical to the ghost-writing. Torgan in his sworn statement says the letter was sent as "political cover."
- He says "I do not recall" using the term "political cover" during the negotiations.
Judge for yourself by reading the City Attorney's explanation of events.
The missing piece
FOLF appreciates that the City Attorney and Council members have responded rapidly to document requests, even if we disagree about interpretation. What we're still missing is any explanation or apology for why this critical decision was not disclosed for two years.
