In Clay County dispute with sheriff, lawyers bill six figures and vendors go unpaid
To defend its decision to cut its sheriff’s budget this year, Clay County has incurred more than $600,000 in legal bills, according to records obtained by The Star.
Meanwhile, vendors providing food and medical services to inmates in the county jail continue to go unpaid due to those budget cuts to the sheriff’s office.
What’s more, a majority of the three-member Clay County Commission last week voted to approve a $2.2 million operating budget for the sheriff’s office, down from the $3.1 million that Clay County Sheriff Paul Vescovo requested. Those amounts are what the sheriff would spend on contracts and commodities and don’t include capital costs.
“The action of underfunding the Sheriff’s Office remarkably appears to be a part of an elaborate effort to demoralize the employees of the Sheriff’s Office,” Vescovo’s office said in a written statement.
Presiding Clay County Commissioner Jerry Nolte last week introduced amendments to increase the sheriff’s funding for 2020, but his colleagues on the commission, Luann Ridgeway and Gene Owen, voted those measures down.
“It’s getting down to a degree of pettiness that I find remarkable,” Nolte told The Star.
Vescovo suspects that his office’s budget has been cut the last two years because he initially handled an investigation into allegations of tampering with official records by county officials, including chief budget officer Laurie Portwood. Portwood entered into a deferred prosecution agreement to resolve the charges against her.
Vescovo sued the Clay County Commission earlier this year, saying that the budget cuts posed a threat to his office’s ability to manage the county jail.
Ridgeway and Owen, through their attorneys, argue that as elected leaders of the county, they have the ability to manage a budget as they see fit.
Nolte has sided with Vescovo’s view on the matter.
So did a trial court judge and the Missouri Court of Appeals, which have both ruled that the county needs to fund the sheriff’s jail contracts. The appellate court went further: It found that the county commission’s behavior was “troubling” and “indefensible,” and ordered the county to pay the sheriff’s legal fees.
That means the county would be on the hook for $200,000 in fees to the Seigfried Bingham law firm, which represented Vescovo in the lawsuit. The appeals court did not order the county to pay the $50,000 in fees to Seigfried Bingham to handle the appeal; Vescovo will have to pay for that through his budget.
Add to those figures the $378,339 that the county has been billed to represent Owen and Ridgeway by the Husch Blackwell law firm, as well as a separate firm to represent Nolte, and costs to litigate the sheriff’s budget exceed $600,000.
“I think it’s highly wasteful,” Nolte said.
