Senate debating $200K legislative legal fund, House on Boise County bill...

Posted by Betsy Russell, March 28, 2012 1:24 p.m.

The Senate is taking up HB 695, to create a $200,000 legal fund for the Legislature to hire its own attorneys. Meanwhile, the House is taking up HB 697, the latest version of the Boise County bill, to enable that county to pay a large legal judgment.

Sen. Steve Bair, R-Blackfoot, told the Senate that the legal fund would allow lawmakers to hire another lawyer when, for example, the Attorney General has voted an issue on the Land Board and therefore would have a conflict of interest. Sen. Elliot Werk, D-Boise, responded, "I appreciate the opening debate but none of it holds any water whatsoever. This bill is about lawyer shopping and opinion shopping, very simple, at the taxpayer expense." Werk, who served on the Senate Ethics Committee this year, said, "I've learned a lot about what conflict of interest actually means, and there's no way," just because the Attorney General had voted on an issue on the Land Board, "that an entire gazillion-member staff can't be counted on to provide an honest and open accounting of an opinion on a bill." He added, "It's disturbing ... to see this come up at the last minute. ... The idea of shopping for legal opinions on the taxpayer dime to try and refute what the Attorney General might say about the next hot-button issue - I don't think that's a good use of taxpayer funds, I don't think it's appropriate for the Legislature."

Sen. Les Bock, D-Boise, a lawyer, said, "I would call this the Idaho legal profession stimulus fund."

Sen. Bart Davis, R-Idaho Falls, noted that the governor has his own lawyer. "Most legislative bodies already have their own in-house legal team that are not bill-writers, or just bill-writers, but they perform many of the functions that we lean heavily against our Attorney General for," Davis said. "There are occasions ... that we will want to look and draw upon scholarly legal assistance to guide us, on a variety of issues," outside the Attorney General's staff. "There are other individuals who have a professional expertise that we're not able to draw upon because we lack this tool," Davis said. "This allows us to draw upon outside assistance."