City’s chief legal counsel to end 33-year tenure in May

BRIDGEPORT — The city’s chief legal counsel is preparing to depart after a nearly 33-year career, over six of those as head of the municipal law department.

City Attorney R. Christopher Meyer confirmed Friday that he is planning his exit by the end of May.

“That’s not saying it couldn’t happen sooner,” Meyer added.

Initially hired in the 1980s by then-Mayor Tom Bucci, Meyer, a Bridgeport native and current resident of the Black Rock neighborhood, worked in the law department until 2014 when he resigned during the tail end of Mayor Bill Finch’s administration.

Meyer a few months later subsequently became a top campaign adviser to another former boss — ex-Mayor Joe Ganim — when Ganim launched his successful comeback. Ganim had run Bridgeport from 1991 until 2003, ousted Finch in 2015’s Democratic primary and went on to win that November’s general election.

Soon afterward the returned Ganim returned Meyer to the municipal payroll as head legal counsel for his administration.

“I never expected to be the head of the office this long,” Meyer, 60, said Friday.

Ganim won another four-year term in 2019 and is expected to seek re-election in 2023.

“I think he’s been a great mayor for the city and plan on devoting lots of time to helping him get reelected,” Meyer said, emphasizing he is not leaving because of any issues with his boss. He said he simply believes it is time for fresh leadership in the legal office

“I want to give someone else a chance to bring some new, fresh ideas,” Meyer said. ““There's no immediate reason I’m leaving other than I’ve done it a long time now and renewal I think is good for a place.”

Meyer credited himself with working hard to try and reorganize and modernize the law department and with encouraging more teamwork among the nearly two-dozen staff who report to him. He also became known for the once-per-month buffet lunches he hosted at work which, Meyer said, were paid for out of his own pocket rather than with a legal budget that many City Council members have traditionally sought to trim.

“We’d invite council members, some members of the public,” Meyer said. “I wanted to promote camaraderie and people working together.”

Under Meyer the Ganim administration also launched an online method for submitting Freedom of Information Act requests for municipal documents. City Hall had heralded the system as a major step in establishing a more transparent government. But, as reported earlier this week, the number of FOIA submissions has exploded from 544 in 2017 to an estimated 2,167 currently, and Meyer is looking to hire a paralegal to eliminate the backlog and avoid potential state-imposed penalties.

Meyer, like some of his predecessors, has also sometimes been accused of working solely for the mayor, although technically he is legal counsel for the entirety of Bridgeport government. In fact the City Council is again considering engaging its own attorney in an effort by members to be more independent of the executive branch, although similar past proposals have always failed to move forward.

“I’ve tried to be the lawyer for the city,” Meyer said Friday. “A lot of people misunderstand the city attorney only as being the mayor’s. Or people that have an agenda like to push that (claim). Lots of times the mayor and I disagree on something. We’ll have a discussion, talk it out and he’ll understand and say, ‘I accept that.’ They don’t see the disagreements we have in private.”

Ganim in an interview Friday called Meyer “an excellent manager.”

“The city’s going to miss him both as an outstanding lawyer but also as head of that department, which is reorganized and more focused than I’ve ever seen it and saved the city tens if not hundreds of millions,” he said. “I respect the fact at this point in his life and career that Chris ... wants to think about where he wants to go in his future.”

Ganim declined to suggest a replacement but said the law department is “organized to the point where, hopefully, it would be easy for someone to take over.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do, whether I’ll go into private practice again,” Meyer said. But, he added, he will not take the sometimes controversial route of some other municipal lawyers who have retired and then been hired back by the city as private consultants.

Since his tenure as mayor ended Bucci has been a private labor attorney and, in that role, regularly been at odds with Bridgeport’s law department.

“Chris is the utmost professional. Very capable and competent. He’s a good public servant,” Bucci said Friday, adding being Bridgeport City Attorney is “an extremely tough job.”

“You have to follow the law and be guided by the law while there may be others interested in pulling one way or the other (and) skirting the legal envelope,” Bucci said. “There are so many competing interests you’re dealing with — department heads, the City Council, the public. And you’re dealing with the mayor, probably the hardest thing to do.”