SUE PHILLIPS
WESTFIELD – Susan Phillips is a busy lady these days.
Westfield’s City Solicitor manages a small roster of lawyers who handle the daily legal wranglings between the city and the rest of the world.
“We have over 300 open files, and they range anything from litigation to agency issues, departmental issues and files,” said Phillips, adding that several litigation matters are currently in federal court. “One of them, there was a fight between two students, and the parents of one of the students have sued the other student plus the city of Westfield for failure to supervise and all sorts of other things.”
Phillips stated that cases of that nature tend to take up a lot of the Law Department’s time, but not all at once.
“They kind of sit for periods of time. We’ve got cases in superior court,” she said before mentioning attorneys Brian Pearly and Bill O’Grady, who handles litigation part-time. “(These cases) range from people who’ve made a claim that we haven’t paid, so they sue us, sewer backups, that sort of thing. Employee claims or any other issues, they generally end up in superior court.”
Housing court also provides Phillips’ staff with lots of work.
“Shanna Reed just finished a short time ago a receivership on a property that was in disrepair, and thats basically when you ask the court to appoint somebody to manage the property, fix it up and bring it up to code,” explained Phillips. “The property is in the process of being sold, so we have a lot of stuff that we do.”
Phillips added that the Law Department handles appellate tax board work as well.
“If you dispute the amount of taxes you should be paying on your property, you go before the local assessors, and if they don’t give you the relief you want, you can go to the appellate tax board,” she said. “They have hearings scheduled out here, but sometimes we have to go to Boston.”
Land court cases handled by the Law Department are handled in Boston only, which means that sometimes lawyers from Phillips’ office must travel to Suffolk County for hearings, which can sometimes take only 10 minutes.
“If somebody has a dispute… We have one on the north side where someone wants to put a subdivision and they say they’ve got frontage, but we’re telling them you really don’t, it’s not a road,” she said, adding that they are dealing with a couple of cases of this nature. “They can go to superior or land court. If they go to land court, it means we’ve got to take the trip to Boston.”
The Law Department is also handling over 60 active tax foreclosure cases that’re also only heard in the land court in Boston, which Phillips handles personally.
There are also several pending civil service cases which Phillips said the Law Department is handling.
“Those are generally police and fire, but some other departments – if somebody doesn’t get promoted or if someone has a grievance about their work, they can bring it to the civil service commission, which generally meets in Springfield,” she said. “We do all the ABCC (Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission) appeals. We’re waiting for a decision we had months ago on Tommy D’s. we’re waiting for the agency to get back to us.”
Phillips’ Department also goes before the Division of Labor Relations often, most notably during last year’s contractual dispute between the city and it’s teachers, as well as the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.
She said that during her tenure as chief solicitor, her office has tried to spend more time on what she refers to as “pending files.”
“So a department head comes to us with an issue and they want us to be involved in it,” she said, citing Barnes Regional Airport as a frequent flier with the Law Department. “They have a lot of leases. We’re finding that they were kind of a hodge-podge over the years, and we’re trying to create a master lease template.”
Phillips stated that the Law Department deals with the airport’s leases, contracts, and even evictions.
“This past year we did the eviction of the former tenant of the restaurant,” she said. “We did the lease with Whip City Aviation, the year before we did GulfStream.”
While various city departments rely on the the Law Department as their house counsel, they also handle small claims, including a familiar scourge that ravaged the Whip City this winter: potholes.
“Chapter 84 says you can sue a city or town for a defect in a public way for up to $5,000, but it’s very stringent on the notice requirements and other elements,” she said, adding that this year the city dealt with dozens of such cases. “All in all, probably 50 to 75 and it could be upward of that. People fill out a form through the Mayor’s Office or online, and then we do an analysis first to see if they’ve complied with the statute, because it’s very strict. If you don’t send notice to us within 30 days with specificity, we’re going to send you a denial letter.”
When asked just how much the city has shelled out in pothole claims this year, Phillips guessed around $10,000.
“The last schedule of bills I did was probably about $1,600, but there’ve been more,” she said. “($10,000) is a lot when you figure the average claim is not that much, but we had some multiple failures this year.”
“The standard is, if a pothole develops and we don’t know about it, we’re not responsible for it,” Phillips explained. “But once we have notice of it, we’re responsible. So part of our analysis is to find out if someone reported it and if DPW knew about it and didn’t fill it.”
Among the most controversial cases the Law Department has dealt with over the past year was a case which pitted Westfield Mayor Daniel M. Knapik against David A. Flaherty, Jane Wensley and property owner David Costa.
In April, U.S. District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor ruled that Knapik violated the rights of the plaintiffs and issued his amended order of judgment stating that Knapik’s ordering the removal of political lawn signs on November 7, 2011 constituted content-based, but not intentional, discrimination in violation of the rights of the Plaintiffs.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and it was the first time in my experience where you had a sitting city councilor suing a city mayor, so it put our department clearly in a conflict position,” Phillips said. “We took the role of representing our larger client, the city of Westfield.”
“We have an ordinance regarding indemnification, so we took a look at that and determined that the ordinance anticipated this, and said we would hire outside counsel, so we hired Attorney Pakula to represent the mayor. Then we pretty much just sat back.”
Phillips said her only involvement in the case was observing and making recommendations to Pakula on how to minimize the financial impact on the city.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s done. It was painful but my decision to indemnify was based on what we need to do,” she said. “Unless the City Council is willing to change that ordinance and not indemnify anyone, including themselves… it is what it is.”
“Police and fire and most employees have indemnification provisions in their contracts. I have one. Every union has one,” she said. “The ordinance affects elected officials and grants them the same protections that every other employee has.”
