City out of the frying pan...

The City of Prince George and local taxpayers are discovering that cost overruns on major developments are not the worst thing that can happen. What’s worse than million of dollars in unplanned spending? The lawyers, of course. Between the Moccasin Flats fiasco and the gravel mine lawsuit, the city seems unable to get out of legal hot water once it’s jumped in with both feet. What the two cases seem to have in common are overzealous city staff taking action without finding out whether they have the legal authority to do so.

The City of Prince George apologized and withdrew its appeal on Moccasin Flats last week. The wording of the apology seems to have itself been lawyered, possibly to avoid or reduce liability from any future civil lawsuits. The city’s legal peril when it comes to Moccasin Flats may not be over, regardless of what happens to the encampment as the weather improves.

As for the gravel mine, the defendants are arguing that the damages are already more than $500,000 and continue to climb. The defendants seem to be particularly annoyed that the city publicly announced that the case was settled, when clearly it wasn’t.

And don’t forget the city hired a lawyer to do an external review of the parkade spending nightmare (and didn’t find out anything that they and local residents didn’t already know).

So how much is all this time and money being spent on lawyers by the City of Prince George costing?

Sadly, we won’t see the 2021 amount until the Statements of Financial Information are released later this year and the 2022 spending won’t be public until June 2023. Even then, the numbers will likely be uncertain. That’s because the city has historically only identified businesses like law firms as vendors if those companies received more than $25,000 in the fiscal year for services provided. Lining up the names of law firms and how much they billed the city won’t help much because it won’t be identified what the lawyers were actually doing. Unless council were to demand a financial report from administration precisely identifying the city’s annual legal costs it will never be clear how much the city has spent on lawyers.

There are two certainties here as far as local taxpayers are concerned. The only people who come out ahead when the lawyers are involved are the lawyers themselves, and lawyers aren’t cheap.