County to hire outside attorney for auditor’s office

The county will hire a second outside attorney to represent Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, whose challenge to the conduct of routine business has frayed relations with supervisors and the county's staff attorneys.

“They're saying basically they want to wash their hands of representing the office of auditor,” Miller said this afternoon.

That may be the only point of agreement between Miller, supervisors, and Assistant County Attorney Gary Jarvis, who wrote in a letter to supervisors that Miller “has made the comparmentalization of defense of the aforementioned legal actions and the provision of legal advice to Auditor Miller concerning seemingly unrelated auditor's office business untenable.”

After receiving the letter Wednesday, supervisors instructed Jarvis to help Miller locate law firms qualified to advise him on day-to-day operations of his office. The firms will likely be from outside the county, and supervisors will closely monitor the costs involved, Langston said.

Local firms “do enough work with Linn County at various levels that they couldn't take this on,” Langston said. ”We need to set some parameters on the amount of money. We don't want to end up with this big legal bill.”

Langston estimated an outside firm could bill the county $175 an hour to advise Miller.

Miller filed suit in February against the supervisors after they refused to authorize pay for a temporary deputy auditor. Miller wanted the position to audit internal audits of county departments' independently managed accounts.

After he filed the suit, the supervisors authorized Miller to hire an outside attorney to represent him, to be paid out of the auditor's budget with a limit of $5,000. Miller hired Cedar Rapids attorney Peter Riley.

Meanwhile, Assistant County Attorney Robert Hruska represented the supervisors while other staff at the county attorney's office handled routine questions from the auditor's office.