Longview out-of-pocket costs relating to Swanson firing pass $500,000

City pays $45,000 to defend council foursome, but legal costs likely to continue mounting — a lot

The City of Longview’s out-of-pocket costs stemming to the controversial firing of City Manager Kris Swanson last March have hit at least $500,000, and they could get much, much bigger depending on the course of litigation related to the firing.

Lawyers defending four city council members who fired Swanson last March have so far billed the city $45,000, according to records I obtained through the state Open Public Records law.

Chehalis lawyer Eric Carlson and Friday Harbor attorney Nicholas Power are defending the council foursome in a suit alleging that they violated the state Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) when they fired Swanson and immediately appointed retired police chief Jim Duscha as interim manager.

Power is charging $350 an hour; Carlson is charging $250 an hour.

The billings for “legal services” do not specify the specific nature of their work. Carlson’s last billing is dated October 2, while Power’s most recent submission is dated January 1.

Costs to date of this lawsuit are likely just chump change compared to what they will end up totaling. The case is crawling along, and proceedings are barely under way.

The “discovery” phase of the case still is in its early phases. Defendants, for example, have yet to answer “interrogatories” — questions — put to them in November about their meetings, communications and other actions early last year.

In addition, as the case continues, there likely will be challenges to the admissibility of some evidence.

The sheer body of potential evidence and the number of parties involved seems to guarantee a long — and costly — discovery, pretrial and trial process.

For example, recent court filings show that defense lawyers are again asking that the city to be “joined” — or added — as a defendant to the suit, saying the municipality has an interest and potential stake in the proceedings and outcome. If the plaintiffs resist, the defense is asking that the case be dismissed.

(The judge in the case last summer had agreed to join the city to the case, but he later reversed himself when the city contract attorney objected and cited a procedural flaw. )

The request has two apparent tactical purposes: One, the defendants want to tap into the city’s deep pockets should they lose the case and get put on the hook for damages; two, in the name of judicial efficiency, the defense attorneys want to make sure all parities with some interest in the case are included in order to avoid potential additional lawsuits later.

The plaintiffs are former City Councilman Mike Wallin and Longview citizens Thomas Samuels and John Melink. A group of supporters is helping pay their legal costs, which likely will be considerable, too.

With the city bankrolling the defense attorney fees, the ability of the plaintiffs to continue to pay their Seattle attorney, Michelle Earl Hubbard, is likely the key to sustaining the case.

This is a primary reason that citizens often are at a big disadvantage pursuing legal redress for illegal government secrecy.

The plaintiffs hope to recover attorney fees if they win or settle the case. Hubbard, one of the state’s leading open government attorneys, has called the defendant councilors’ alleged OPMA violations the most egregious she has ever seen.

The plaintiffs declined to disclose how much the case has cost them to date. When they filed the suit last spring they did not name the city as a defendant to avoid obligating taxpayers to pay to defend the councilors.

Nevertheless, the four council members voted last summer for the city to pay their legal fees, leading to vociferous conflict-of-interest complaints.

The city’s liability insurance carrier — the Washington Cities Insurance Authority — had declined to pay for legal representation, saying it had warned the defendants of their legal jeopardy in advance and that their own, purposeful actions instigated the OPMA suit.

The OPMA is an open government law. It prohibits elected officials from making de facto decisions privately or through a “daisy chain” series of nonpublic discussions.

Wallin, Samuel and Melink, using the open records law, have documented hundreds of phone calls, text messages and emails among the four defendant councilors that they contend hows a pattern of collusion and secret deal making. The defendant council members— Erik Halvorson, Kalei LaFave, Keith Young and Councilman/Mayor Spencer Boudreau — deny wrongdoing.

Other costs related to Swanson’s ouster have become more definitive:

• The final cost of paying consultant Exigy LLC to help develop the city’s budget in the absence of Swanson and other financial expertise was $73,500, according to billings I obtained through a public records request.

• The final costs for severance payments and other settlements to Swanson, attorney Dana Gigler and Assistant City Manager Ann Rivers now total about $355,000. Gigler and Rivers resigned after Swanson’s firing. Swanson has dropped claims against the city, so this settlement cost is final.

• The city paid a Florida-based head-hunting firm $34,500 to conduct the search for a new city manager.

These costs, combined with the OPMA lawsuit charges, total $508,000, enough to pay the salaries of four entry level police officers for a year.

Multiple former mayors, city managers, council members, city staff and others urged the council’s conservative majority not to fire Swanson, who’d stepped into the role a year earlier. Yet the majority bloc did so, officially without cause, triggering a rash of top staff resignations and council divisions.

The council only recently hired a new city manager by appointing the city’s parks director, Jennifer Wills. But it has struggled to fill other leadership postions.

In additional the costs listed above, perhaps these two following expenses could have been avoided had Swanson not been fired. Decide for yourself:

• Did the council majority have to hire Duscha at a year’s salary of $177,000? It simply could have appointed Rivers the interim manager. Perhaps Rivers would have been overloaded doing both jobs, but the city could have hired her help for much less than it paid Duscha. It ended up hiring Exigy to help with the budget despite hiring Duscha. And it delayed the search for a permanent manager for months during jockeying clearly aimed at giving Duscha the post permanently. On the other hand, Rivers had conflicts with the council and may not have wanted the post.

• Swanson, like her predecessor as city manager, Kurt Sacha, served as finance director, too. The city has been trying to hire one unsuccessfully for months an despite budgeting $205,000 in wages and benefits for the position in 2025. Perhaps one could argue the city needs a separate finance director. However, the fact is that this will be a permanent added city expense as a result of Swanson’s firing — once the city finds someone to take the position.

One will never know the complete financial ramifications of the council’s termination decision. They will include lost opportunity costs as well, such as the city’s failure to complete a $10 million bond sale that Swanson had lined up at a highly favorable interest rate but that went belly up with her ouster.

These loses are hard if not impossible to quantify, but there is no doubt that the costs of this misguided decision will continue to mount.