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PTC ordered to pay paper’s legal fees

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

A plan to hold a closed meeting with developers and attorneys from a homeowners association over the Target lawsuit will cost Peachtree City $3,842.25 in attorneys fees, a judge has ruled.

Fayette County Superior Court Judge Christopher C. Edwards ruled last week that The Citizen newspaper’s attorney’s fees should be paid by the city as provided by state open meetings laws.

Edwards ruled at a previous hearing in October that the meeting with the city council, Faison Enterprises and attorneys for the Kedron Hills homeowner’s association would have been illegal had it taken place.

State law doesn’t allow anyone who is not a member or employee of an agency to sit in on closed sessions with the exception of legal counsel for the agency, Edwards ruled.

“We regret Peachtree City’s attorneys led the City Council into an unnecessary waste of city funds in defending this indefensible secret meeting,” publisher Cal Beverly said. “They were able to cite no statute or court case in defense of their position, yet they persisted in pushing for the closed meeting.

“This is one clear case in which the lawyers’ bosses, the City Council, ought to have stepped in and stopped this before they embarrassed themselves,” Beverly said. “Unfortunately, no one stepped up to the plate and told the lawyers, ‘No,’ and it wound up costing the city treasury nearly $4,000.

“Mark this down as yet another example of publicly-paid lawyers giving questionable advice to their clients, our local governments, and then the taxpayers end up footing the inevitable bill,” the publisher said.

Judge Edwards said in his order that the newspaper’s actions in stopping the closed meeting might have saved many thousands of dollars in lawsuits resulting from the planned executive session.

The Citizen filed the suit after receiving a notice from the city that it planned to meet in executive session Oct. 21 to discuss litigation matters. The general public would have been excluded from the proceedings.

After being warned by the newspaper’s attorney, Don Johnson of Fayetteville, that the planned meeting seemed to violate the state’s open meetings law, the city’s lawyers decided to go ahead with the planned closed meeting.

At that point, the newspaper asked Judge Edwards for an injunction forbidding the closed session.

In a hearing before Judge Edwards, the city argued unsuccessfully that it should be allowed to meet with the developer and homeowner’s association attorneys in order to try to settle that lawsuit, which blossomed from the city’s failure to approve the conceptual site plan for the third phase expansion of the Kedron Village retail center, which includes the Target store.

The city argued attorney’s fees shouldn’t be awarded to the newspaper because the meeting never occurred. Edwards rejected that argument in a five-page order entered Wednesday, Dec. 1.

“The act authorizes injunctions, without excluding attorney’s fees when an injunction is granted,” Edwards said.

The city also argued it should not be responsible for attorney’s fees because it planned the meeting based on advice from the city’s attorneys.

Edwards noted that since the legislature allows an agency to conduct a closed meeting, it implied that any person not from that agency should be excluded from the meeting.

Had the illegal meeting taken place, and a vote taken later in open session to approve the site plan, it would have complicated the matter by perhaps giving the developer legal rights, whether or not the closed meeting itself were ruled illegal, Edwards noted.

“Such a scenario could easily have resulted in costing Peachtree City ten, or even one hundred times, the attorney’s fees now being sought by Plantiff’s counsel, for the same reason that ‘a stitch in time saves nine,’ regardless of which party ultimately prevailed,” Edwards wrote.