Experience, experience, expereince! The more, the better!

By Ron Davis

What constitutes an effective City Attorney's Office?

The City Attorney's office functions as a small law firm. In this case, the Huntington Beach City Attorney's office consists of eight attorneys. The office is certainly not deficient in municipal law. Currently, counting the experience of the retiring incumbent, the office has more that 100 years of municipal law experience. Even after Ms. Hutton leaves the office, the office will still have approximately 75 combined years of municipal law experience. The election of the deputy city attorney with 6 years of experience running for this seat, will not increase that level of experience. She is part of the office presently.

Dispite the level of municipal law experience, the city has experienced some disasterous legal results. Legal results that cost the taxpayers of this city millions, and legal results that embarrassed the community. The question is: how and why?

24 years ago, when we elected the retiring incumbent, she had but 5 years of experience. And, all of that experience was as a deputy in another city attorney's office. She then came to our city as the leader of our office. Being a leader, isn't only about being the boss, but more about being the teacher who teaches based on their own experience. Because her experience did not involve trial work, she was unable to teach her deputies how to try cases. As a result, most of the trial work, and there's a lot of it, is referred to expensive outside attorneys.

While we've had a redevelopment agency in our city for the past 30 years, the retiring incumbent's experience didn't include redevelopment law, and hence she's been incapble of training someone in that area, and most of the redevelopment work is done by expensive outside attorneys.

The simple fact is that one can expect and teach only that which they know through their experience. And, in this case, five, six, or ten years of narrow legal experience, was not , and is not enough.

I have more legal experience than all of the other candidates combined. Not only do I have more legal experience, I have more diversified experience, and my experience is in areas relevant to the city attorneys office.

The city attorney's office doesn't write wills and trusts, and neither do I. The city attorney's office doesn't do divorces, and neither do I.

The city attorney's office prosecutes violations of law, and I did that for 2 1/2 years in the Orange County District Attorney's office. The City Attorney's office should be going to trial on behalf of the city, and to the appellate court when necessary. I've done that the past 29 years. The city attorney's office is involved with labor law. I've done that. The city attorney's office is involved with contracts and real estate. I've done that too. The city attorney's office drafts ordinances. I've not only drafted them, but successfully attacked them. I was even honored to be asked to assist an Assembly member in drafting proposed statewide legislation.

I not only bring 29 years of diverse legal experience, I also bring my 30 years of involvement and personal commitment to the community. Apart from raising my family here, I've been involved in this community. For the past three years I was the featured columnist for the Huntington Beach Independent. My writing even garnered a statewide award. I wrote about the actions of the city council, and other events in the community. In order to do so, I had to pay close attention to the community. For a short time, until I resigned to run for office, I hosted the show "Perspective" on our own HBTV-3. I did so because I believe that there should be a forum through which we can discuss and debate important community issues.

Through my experience I intend to develop a trial department and reduce our reliance on expensive outside attorneys. I intend to develope some in-house expertise in redevelopment law to also reduce our reliance on outside attorneys. Because of my background as a deputy district attorney, I intend to interface with our police department to ensure that we not only prosecute those who violate the law, but do so in a fashion which minimizes any civil liability to the taxpayers.

I intend to utilize my 29 years of experience to accomplish at least two goals.

1. Reduce the costs of legal services to the community so that the savings can be used to fill your potholes, line the sewers, or any other program approved by the city council.

2. Provide faster and better legal service to my client - the taxpayers of Huntington Beach.