For all the grief Kimo Crossman gets for making public records requests of city officials, you gotta love some of the stuff he comes up with.
After Mayor Gavin Newsom called for voluntary resignations from all department heads and appointed commissioners with little apparent foresight, Crossman made a records request of the City Attorney’s office for the accumulated amount of billable hours that office spent providing advice to their city clients on the legality of resigning.
The total: 112.75, according to a response emailed to Crossman from the city attorney’s deputy press secretary Alexis Thompson. That number is a “comprehensive summary of the number of hours this Office has spent from September 10, 2007 through the present date on its work and advice concerning ‘the Newsom mass resignation request,'” Thompson wrote.
Matt Dorsey, press secretary for city attorney Dennis Herrera confirmed to us that $200 is a good estimate of a billable hour of city attorney time. (Some bill higher, some lower, and there’s a range to the quantity and quality of advice given.)
That’s a total of $22,550 spent advising a swath of city officials, when Newsom could have just pointed a finger at the 10 or so he wants out.