Both McHenry attorney's candidates may be right on savings claims

A centerpiece of McHenry County State's Attorney Louis Bianchi's re-election campaign is his claim that he has saved the county $1.5 million by drastically cutting back how much his office pays private law firms to fight the county's legal battles.

His opponent in next week's Republican primary, Dan Regna, calls the claims false, saying that while the current administration has slashed outside counsel costs, the savings have been used to expand the state's attorney's office at greater taxpayer cost.

So, who's right?

Both.

Or maybe neither.

As with most issues that involve government and dollar amounts with a lot of zeros at the end, it depends where you get the figures and how you spin them.

Budget figures acquired from the county through Freedom of Information Act requests show that Bianchi has kept his promise to slash the amount of legal work -- and thereby the amount of taxpayer money -- sent out to private law firms.

Between 2002 and 2004, the final three years of former state's attorney Gary Pack's administration, the county paid about $2.5 million in legal fees to outside attorneys, according to figures provided by the county's budget office.

In Bianchi's first three years as state's attorney, that number dropped to about $1.5 million.

About $250,000 of that, however, funded legal work related to the Indeck peaker plant case, a matter farmed out to private counsel long before Bianchi took office.

Subtract that amount from the $1.5 million spent by Bianchi's office on outside counsel, and he could legitimately claim he's reduced by about $1.25 million the amount of taxpayer money going to private law firms.

That's less than the $10,000 a week Bianchi is touting, but a substantial reduction nonetheless.

But cutting the amount spent on outside counsel and saving taxpayers money are not one and the same, Regna argues.

While there have been savings on outside legal fees, the state's attorney's office also has grown significantly under Bianchi's tenure. An office that employed 24 lawyers when Bianchi took his oath in December 2004 now employs 32.

Budget figures show a corresponding growth in spending. Expenses in the state's attorney's office rose from $2.92 million in 2004 to $3.87 million in 2007, an increase of about 32 percent, according to county budget numbers.

Regna says Bianchi has been robbing Peter to pay Paul.

But would it be fair or accurate to say Bianchi's expanding budget is a result of his new hiring costs outpacing his cutbacks on outsourcing? Probably not.

While he did hire two more assistant state's attorneys and took on other additional costs, they do not account for most of the new spending.

In fact, much of that new spending goes to matters outside Bianchi's control: staffing needs in four new courtrooms, growing caseloads, rising costs of court transcripts, etc.

So, to measure the true savings, or costs, of Bianchi's policy, we checked to see how much more, or less, Bianchi is spending by keeping those cases in-house than his predecessor did by sending them out.

It may not be a perfect apples to apples comparison, because such a comparison would be nearly impossible to compute. But it's at least oranges to tangerines.

The examination begins with the county's Tort Fund, which covers the costs of fighting lawsuits and potential litigation. The fund now shows that less money is going out to private lawyers, but more money is being spent to pay the salaries of state's attorney staff.

How much more?

Over three years, Bianchi has paid his staff on average about $402,000 a year from the Tort Fund. In 2004, Pack paid his staff almost $231,000 from the same fund, or about $171,000 less than the average Bianchi year.

Subtract that $171,000 a year from Bianchi's three-year savings of $1.25 million and we've got an estimate of just how much he's saved taxpayers: $737,000.

That's a significant savings, but less than half the number Bianchi trumpets on the campaign trail.

Bianchi has some dispute with those numbers. The cost of taking the work in-house is the salaries of two attorneys and partial salary for a legal secretary, a total of about $135,000 annually. Other costs reflected in his Tort Fund, he says, are the result of shifting salaries that already were being paid from another portion of his budget.

He also believes he's saved more than the $1.25 million the budget office numbers indicate, saying that, for example, those figures don't show $100,000 saved by keeping the defense of a particularly costly lawsuit in-house.

And, he notes, nearly all the outside counsel work his office is still funding are cases initially farmed out by his predecessor. Most of those cases, he said, would have been handled in-house had they been filed since he took office, at savings to the county.

But even using his numbers, the savings only add up to a total of $945,000.

Again, a substantial savings of $315,000 a year, one worth bragging about. But still less than he claims.