Sense prevails over justice

Rosemary Bolin is a sensible person. When her husband, Mike, was ready to ditch his comfortable and secure job on the Alabama Supreme Court and become county attorney in the land of the largest municipal bankruptcy, Rosemary said something very sensible:

Are you nuts?

Justice Mike Bolin

Of course, I’m sure she said it in a more loving way. But that was the basic message Justice Bolin conveyed this week when he explained why he accepted the job of Jefferson County’s top legal advisor late last week only to have Rosemary Bolin convince him over the weekend to turn it down.

When he accepted the offer, the lifelong Jefferson County resident said he was taking the job out of a sense of duty and service to the community. Bolin also cited the advantage of having spent 12 years as Jefferson County Probate Court judge, running a county department, before his election to the state high court in 2004.

The paycheck sure wasn’t the lure. Although the previous two county attorneys were paid northward of $375,000 per year, Bolin would have been paid $220,000, a little more than what he is making now. Assuming re-election to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2016, Bolin could serve past the mandatory retirement age of 70 (judges cannot seek election after they turn 70; he’s 64 now).

From a pure career standpoint, becoming county attorney would have been a step down. With its myriad legal problems -- including filing the largest government bankruptcy in U.S. history -- Jefferson County spends on outside counsel roughly 20 times the amount it spends on its in-house county attorneys. The way Jefferson County hemorrhages legal fees, the real money is in being outside counsel.

Frankly, landing Justice Bolin would have been one of the best things to happen to Jefferson County in a generation – if for no other reason than the instant credibility he would have brought to the county’s reputation.  But success would have required enough miracles to put Bolin well on the pathway to sainthood.

And that’s essentially what Rosemary Bolin pointed out, Justice Bolin told Birmingham News/al.com reporter Barnett Wright.

“She was just worried about the challenges facing every player on the county team," Bolin told Wright. "And I think she worried about whether or not I would be happy giving up a job that I am happy with, taking on a world of problems where any lawyer that comes in here is going to have a learning curve.”

This is the hornets’ nest he would have called home:

The county owes $4 billion in bond debt, and while some of that principal probably will be wiped out, the county is expected to emerge bankruptcy still owing $3 billion. About one-fourth of its overall debt currently has a steady revenue source, a one-cent sales tax. But most of Jefferson County’s bond debt was from the $3 billion it borrowed for a corruption-plagued court-ordered sewer rehabilitation program; the sewer revenues available to retire that debt are inadequate despite gargantuan rate increases since the project began in 1996.

The county’s creditworthiness is laughable, making it nearly impossible to take on any new capital projects any time soon to address a fast-crumbling infrastructure. After litigation killed an occupational tax that generated $70 million per year, the county was left with no cash. A vindictive legislative delegation, which controls the county’s economic destiny, won’t replace the tax or come up with alternate revenue.

A revenue drought that started in 2009 has forced county commissioners to cut hourly staff beyond the bone – leaving the state’s largest county government unable to fulfill even the most basic of services. People wait all day in line to renew a car tag or register a vehicle. Zoning and road maintenance are unable to meet demand. The sheriff’s office cannot adequately secure courtrooms and at one point stopped responding to wreck calls. Criminal defense lawyers once had to pool money to provide toilet paper to the overcrowded county jail.

Somehow, some folks in the 1980s thought it was a brilliant idea to make Jefferson County commissioners the heads of various departments. Running county departments put tremendous power in the hands of the commissioners, especially during a period when they routinely approved the others’ recommendations as a legislative courtesy.

It created the climate that resulted in a rigged, pay-for-play scheme during the sewer rehabilitation project during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Roughly two dozen federal convictions followed, including county commissioners, several other county officials and contractors.

One of the few beneficial things the legislative delegation has done was to require the Jefferson County to hire a county manager who would supervise department heads, theoretically getting the politicians out of the day-to-day business of running the government. But commissioners continue to resist that loss of power. Some continue to meddle in county departments.

The current commission leadership seems resistant to legal advice it doesn’t want to hear. Some of the disputes between key commissioners and the former county attorney, Jeff Sewell, concerned legal advice Sewell gave – including how the commissioners needed to stop meddling in departmental affairs. Given the hubris that leads some Jefferson County commissioners to believe they personally can successfully negotiate against the best and brightest on Wall Street, perhaps those commissioners viewed such legal advice as misguided and inappropriate.

Give commissioners credit for thinking big in seeking a new county attorney. They’ve put up several big names on their wish list. But in the county’s situation, landing one of them may be wishful thinking.