“City of Keene” Forces Taxpayers to Pay Over $20,000 for Private Attorneys

In a blog post published here this summer, it was asked what the “City of Keene” hiring of hotshot private attorneys Eric G. Moskowitz and Charles P. Bauer would cost taxpayers. Now we have an initial idea. According to the Keene Sentinel’s feature story on the Robin Hood case dismissal, city boss John MacLean claims,

the money to pay for attorney Charles P. Bauer of Concord and his legal team came out of the city attorney’s line item budget, and estimated that cost to be somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000. The city hired Bauer’s firm because it has more experiences with these kinds of cases than the city attorney, officials said.

Was the city manager able to authorize this spending on his own without consulting the city council? IF the council was consulted, what was the vote and relevant discussion?

In reality, Gallagher, Callahan, and Gartrell was hired because they are the go-to law firm for NH government agencies. That’s what MacLean (or presumably MacLean – the Sentinel story cites city “officials” as the source of this claim) means when he says the firm “has more experiences with these kinds of cases”. Bauer’s clients are frequently cities, towns, and likely state agencies. He and his associates live off the taxpayer trough in all manner of frivolous and aggressive court litigation on behalf of municipalities.

Now, Bauer will likely be pressing to appeal to the NH Supreme Court, and it should be interesting to see how “the City” handles the prospect of an appeal now that people know how much “the City” has already spent.

Regardless of whether a $30,000 appeal is in the cards, Keene’s taxpayers will be on-the-hook for the $20k+ already spent on attorneys’ fees by “the City”. Considering Keene is one of the top most taxed towns in NH, one must wonder how much more abuse taxpayers will take before refusing to pay for the city people’s continued aggression against peaceful people.

Aggression, of course, is all “the City” knows to “fix” its problems – in this case, those pesky Robin Hooders, who are preventing much of the aggression “the City” is using to threaten motorists for parking downtown. Rather than respect the rights of the Robin Hooders to speak to and record the enforcers, they decide to attack them in court at a tremendous cost. And why shouldn’t they? It’s not like they are spending their own money! They extorted the money (and will continue to do so) from taxpayers by threatening to take your homes and businesses if they don’t pay up.

It’s time for the city people to stop their aggression against their peaceful neighbors and start offering their products and services on a consensual basis, like the supermajority of the rest of us do.

Or, they can just keep fighting tooth-and-nail the inevitable rise of the ideas of liberty thanks to the thousands of people moving here as part of the Free State Project, and watch as their precious legitimacy slips away as we here at Free Keene continue to show their ridiculous, aggressive behavior to the world.