SUE PHILLIPS
WESTFIELD – Sitting in her third floor City Hall office, City Solicitor Susan Phillips sat at her desk and pondered her career in municipal law.
Having worked for eight Mayors in both Chicopee and Westfield, Phillips is uniquely qualified to explain the ins and outs of a Law Department.
“When I started here in 2004, there was just a First Assistant and I was the Second Assistant, and that’s kind of an anomaly in the valley. Generally there’s a City Solicitor,” said Phillips. “I can speak to Chicopee because I’ve worked off and on there for 12 years.”
After serving as an Assistant City Solicitor for Chicopee in 1985, Phillips became that city’s City Solicitor in ’86 through ’87, and returned to that post for her law partner Richard Kos’ first term as Mayor of Chicopee from 1998 through 2003.
Following her stint with Kos, a former city solicitor himself, Phillips headed to Westfield for two years full-time. She then split her time between Westfield and Chicopee from 2006 to 2010, when she worked for the city’s next mayor, Mike Bissonnette.
“Chicopee is a hybrid of a part-time and full-time Law Department. When I started many moons ago, they were part-time and all my experience in Chicopee was part-time,” she said. “We all had private practice, and it worked really well in the ’80s and ’90s. It allowed you to get very skilled attorneys with a variety of expertise who weren’t willing to leave their private practice.”
Phillips explained that the city of Chicopee operates differently than Westfield.
“In Chicopee, the (City Solicitor) appointment is a one year term, so it’s kind of hard to leave when you know the expectation is that you may have one year at that job,” she said. “So that drives the part-time status.”
“I believe Chicopee does have one full-time position, and that was created last time I was there to create some continuity in the office,” Phillips said. “It can be very disruptive, in this legal world, when you have a change in administration and you get an entirely new Law Department.”
“Westfield always had a full-time department, but when I started, it was one full-time and one part-time. I became the second full-time person, and I’ve been a strong advocate for having that combination,” she said. “I think a full-time Law Department, with the complexity of municipal law, is essential.”
Phillips said that she has tried to model her department after the city of Springfield’s Law Department, and added that they have done a great job of “creating expertise in departments.”
“You have attorneys who become experts in their fields, and also you try to provide a career track for them, so that this isn’t just a stopover while they’re looking for another job,” she said. “We’ve tried very hard to professionalize the department, to create an ordinance where the staff attorneys working here aren’t necessarily the face of the office, but they’re the ones that do all the legal work and have the authority to make decisions. But they aren’t caught up in what administration might be here.”
Phillips stated that her staff attorneys are approved and appointed to three-year contracts.
“We’ve been fortunate that several administrations have been supportive of building this department, which now has, besides myself, three full-time attorneys, one part-time attorney, and two full-time clericals, which is right about where we should be,” she said. “Chicopee has six part-timers, I think, but Chicopee hires out a lot of other services that we don’t.”
Phillips then referenced attorney Jeffrey Krok, who handles collective bargaining for the city and it’s schools.
“As late as two years ago, we were paying about $40,000 a year to contract out those services, and the schools were paying probably comparable,” she said. “The savings were an important factor, but the other factor was to have continuity in collective bargaining. You have one set of eyes on all the contracts, so it’s been helpful.”
“I know on the city side, I think it’s been productive.” Phillips said. “We hire out when we have to.”
“The best example is when you have a public safety lawsuit. Very often they will have more than one person named in the police department, for example, and that case would have a conflict, so we’d hire out.” she said. “Chicopee very often hires out for their appellate tax board cases. We have attorney (Brian) Pearly do all the appellate tax board cases here, so we have found economies in that.”
Having worked with multiple mayors with a wide range of occupations, Phillips said that working with each has presented unique challenges.
“I didn’t work for Mayor (Richard) Sullivan. I was second in the Department. I found it was a great experience working with him, and his experience being an attorney allowed him to understand issues a little more quickly,” she said. “I came in when he had been mayor for quite awhile, so he had a good sense of how to run the city, so it just seemed that things were smooth.”
Phillips cited her experience with Kos has being an interesting time.
“I think when he was first mayor, he would challenge our opinions more because he too had been a city solicitor,” she said. “Mayor Sullivan, being a lawyer, hadn’t been a solicitor, so he had the knowledge but didn’t question us as much.”
“Mayor Knapik was a city councilor when I got here in 2004 and he was the chair of the L&O committee, so I was assigned to the council,” Phillips said. “So I was accustomed to working with him and he with me, so I think there wasn’t a learning curve of what the expectations were.”
“Having no background in municipal law, it’s really difficult to transition into this because in private practice, you’re meeting with your client and trying to meet their needs, where here, our client is the whole city,” said Phillips, who had her own private practice for 20 years. “It’s really different and we’re very much constrained by open meeting and public records laws. A huge part of this job is training and making sure that departments, boards and commissions know what their obligations are. There are so many more laws and so many more requirements of cities and towns, there are so many more departments.”
“If you do general practice, real estate, personal injury, you’re not going to touch on any of the elements of municipal law that we deal with on a daily basis,” she said.
