Stone questions legal bills from hearing on recall case

Buffalo Grove Trustee Lisa Stone is concerned about the size of the bill from the attorney hired as special counsel to the local electoral board hearing her challenge to the petition for her recall.

But Village President Elliott Hartstein defended the $11,000 bill from attorney Richard Martens at Monday's village board meeting.

Among Stone's concerns are the more than $5,000 Martens billed the village for work done even before she objected to a small fraction of the signatures on the petition filed by citizen David Wells.

Stone is up for recall in the November election. More than 2,000 signatures, double the number required, were collected by Wells. In a special hearing, nearly 90 signatures challenged by Stone were stricken.

Stone said Martens, who charged the village $190 per hour, billed the village for nearly three hours of work for investigating her questions to the village regarding such issues as the number of days she had to look over the petition, how to formally challenge the petition and when she needed to submit her challenge. She said that for all that work, she was given the answer that she needed to hire her own counsel to handle the questions.

"We were billed almost three hours for that answer," she said. "This is taxpayers' money."

Hartstein, however, told her that while he understands the concern, he has reviewed the bill and found it within bounds.

"He presented to us an itemized bill," Hartstein said. Anticipating concerns, he said, "I reviewed the entire bill, which was an itemized bill, line by line, day by day.

Hartstein said he has seen a lot of legal billing and done legal billing himself. "Quite frankly this is a very detailed, itemized bill, explaining what was done and the amount of time that was spent.

"Yes it is a lot of money in the big scheme of things. But it is well itemized and it is fully justifiable based upon the time that was spent -"

Hartstein noted another benefit of having special counsel. He said that if the village faces the same situation again, it now has rules of procedure in place.