Is budget lawsuit flap near end?

In legal matters, as in baseball, it’s never over until it’s over.

Where lawsuits differ from baseball is that sometimes it’s not really over even when it’s over.

It would seem that Sheriff John Darr’s lawsuit against the Columbus Consolidated Government and several of its top officials over his department’s budget process is all but finished. Superior Court Judge John Philip Raymond on Tuesday ruled against Darr on two counts, one having to do with timing and the other to do with larger issues of law.

To what extent, if any, this development is relevant to three other officials’ similar suits against the city will be interesting to follow. And of course, Darr and his legal team have the right to appeal.

Raymond ruled that the first issue, Darr’s challenge to the fiscal 2015 budget (active when the suit was filed), is now moot.

The second point is almost certainly of more significant impact — that the suit is invalid as a matter of law, both state law and the city charter: Darr, though he is a state constitutional officer, is subject to the city budget process and has no standing to exercise separate power over city funds, or any legal right to expect his budget request to be provided in full.

“The Court finds there is no genuine issue of material fact to suggest that Sheriff Darr has been prevented from participating in the recommended budget process,” Raymond wrote; the city and its officials would be “mere conduits of his budget request, in every particular, in their preparation of the Mayor’s Recommended Budget to Council.”

How this ruling might affect similar suits by Marshal Greg Countryman, Superior Court Clerk Linda Pierce and Municipal Court Clerk Vivian Creighton Bishop is a million-dollar question, in a very literal sense. A sore point with many taxpayers (and more than a few voters) has been that as constitutional officers, Darr and Pierce are entitled to have their legal fees paid by the city. Bishop and Countryman are not, but the city must still pay its own legal defense costs.

Some people have been urging the city to cut its losses and settle, on the basis that the suits themselves are costing more than the plaintiffs’ rejected budgets would.

But we have believed from the outset that the rationale for these suits fails the common-sense test. Budgeting is a legislative process, and if any agency — constitutional office or otherwise — can simply write its own number on the line and then sue if that number doesn’t show up on the final budget, then budgeting will no longer be an annual mayor-council process, but a perpetual (and prohibitively expensive) process of litigation.

“Georgia law is clear,” the judge wrote, “that the sheriff is not entitled to a specific amount of funding, nor is he entitled to a specific method of determining his budget.”

It stands to reason, at least from a lay perspective, that the same principle should hold for clerks and marshals as well.

This story was originally published June 23, 2016 at 3:25 PM with the headline "Is budget lawsuit flap near end?."