Print
E-mail
Comment
Rate
Cost of Beaufort County lawsuit, so far, tops $200,000
By EUGENE L. TINKLEPAUGH, Staff Writer
Beaufort County Schools spent over $160,000 on attorneys’ fees during the two months the system spent disputing its budget allocation from county commissioners.
That venture yielded a little more than $750,000 on top of the funding the school system would have received otherwise. School administrators, staff and students will have to wait on those dividends, however. The jury-awarded amount is being withheld until the case is closed. And commissioners aren’t ready to give up the fight over how much funding the schools need to operate this year.
Just in attorneys’ fees, both sides have spent in excess of $200,000 during mediation and the ensuing Superior Court trial. If the jury’s verdict stands, taxpayers are already $1 million in the hole based on what commissioners approved in June — and that’s not counting the added court costs and attorneys’ fees that will pile up throughout an appeals process.
Attorneys representing the school board and the county, respectively, have agreed that an appeal could take up to a year before the mud is dried, turned into dust and settled. There’s also no guarantee the matter will be resolved by the appellate court.
School board lawyer Richard Schwartz said the Court of Appeals could decide to kick the case back to Superior Court for a retrial.
Neil Yarborough, the county’s special counsel in this dispute, has noted that the case may find its way all the way up to the Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, Yarborough filed a documentation-of-transcript arrangement with the Superior Court division, as part of the appellate procedure.
The county is appealing the Superior Court’s decision per the request of the county’s elected officials.
Commissioners granted in June a 3 percent increase to the school system’s local current expense fund. That fund pays for operating costs and is intended to supplement state and federal funding.
School officials had requested a much larger increase to pay for what they were saying were “must-have” line items. When the school system received a fraction of its request, the school board unanimously decided to take the county to court.
The total school budget request for operating expenses was $10.38 million. A Beaufort County jury awarded the system $10.2 million.
According to Yarborough, the county’s appeal will raise fundamental issues about how these cases are tried in the courts.
“We’re going to raise constitutional questions, questions related to who are the proper parties in this action and what is the proper timing of the trial of these actions and what level of proof is required to prevail,” Yarborough said.
Statutorily, these cases are fast-tracked in the courts, so that children get the least impact possible while school funding is tied up. Yarborough said expediting the case hurt his clients’ ability to prepare and resulted in an unfair trial.
Yarborough also said he would argue that because the state has “primary responsibility for educating our children, the state of North Carolina should be joint in the action against Beaufort County.”
Of the six-figure requested increase, $216,037 was to replenish lost operating revenue that the state took away from Beaufort County Schools by revoking school systems’ eligibility to apply for sales-tax refunds.
The school board has filed its own appeal in the trial.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Schwartz said the school board’s appeal centered around evidence that was excluded from the trial.
“We feel that the commissioners’ inappropriate behavior, the excessive funds available to commissioners, and their fiscal policy or lack thereof should not have been excluded,” Schwartz said. “If the judge would have let that evidence in, the jury amount would have been larger.”
Once the county receives the transcript from the Superior Court trial — which could take up to 60 days — it will assemble that and other documents to form the record.
Both the county and the school board identify assignments of error in the case separately but must agree on the record of appeal, which is what the appellate court considers exclusively in its determination.
According to Schwartz, the Court of Appeals could decide the trial was conducted fairly, that there were “problems with the trial but not reversible error” or that the case should be sent back to Superior Court with instructions for further trial proceedings.
If the three-member panel of appellate judges does not reach a unanimous verdict, both sides have the right of appeal to the Supreme Court, Schwartz said. If either side wished to appeal a unanimous verdict, the slighted party could petition the Supreme Court to hear the matter, Schwartz said, and the Supreme Court would have that option.
That venture yielded a little more than $750,000 on top of the funding the school system would have received otherwise. School administrators, staff and students will have to wait on those dividends, however. The jury-awarded amount is being withheld until the case is closed. And commissioners aren’t ready to give up the fight over how much funding the schools need to operate this year.
Just in attorneys’ fees, both sides have spent in excess of $200,000 during mediation and the ensuing Superior Court trial. If the jury’s verdict stands, taxpayers are already $1 million in the hole based on what commissioners approved in June — and that’s not counting the added court costs and attorneys’ fees that will pile up throughout an appeals process.
Attorneys representing the school board and the county, respectively, have agreed that an appeal could take up to a year before the mud is dried, turned into dust and settled. There’s also no guarantee the matter will be resolved by the appellate court.
School board lawyer Richard Schwartz said the Court of Appeals could decide to kick the case back to Superior Court for a retrial.
Neil Yarborough, the county’s special counsel in this dispute, has noted that the case may find its way all the way up to the Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, Yarborough filed a documentation-of-transcript arrangement with the Superior Court division, as part of the appellate procedure.
The county is appealing the Superior Court’s decision per the request of the county’s elected officials.
Commissioners granted in June a 3 percent increase to the school system’s local current expense fund. That fund pays for operating costs and is intended to supplement state and federal funding.
School officials had requested a much larger increase to pay for what they were saying were “must-have” line items. When the school system received a fraction of its request, the school board unanimously decided to take the county to court.
The total school budget request for operating expenses was $10.38 million. A Beaufort County jury awarded the system $10.2 million.
According to Yarborough, the county’s appeal will raise fundamental issues about how these cases are tried in the courts.
“We’re going to raise constitutional questions, questions related to who are the proper parties in this action and what is the proper timing of the trial of these actions and what level of proof is required to prevail,” Yarborough said.
Statutorily, these cases are fast-tracked in the courts, so that children get the least impact possible while school funding is tied up. Yarborough said expediting the case hurt his clients’ ability to prepare and resulted in an unfair trial.
Yarborough also said he would argue that because the state has “primary responsibility for educating our children, the state of North Carolina should be joint in the action against Beaufort County.”
Of the six-figure requested increase, $216,037 was to replenish lost operating revenue that the state took away from Beaufort County Schools by revoking school systems’ eligibility to apply for sales-tax refunds.
The school board has filed its own appeal in the trial.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Schwartz said the school board’s appeal centered around evidence that was excluded from the trial.
“We feel that the commissioners’ inappropriate behavior, the excessive funds available to commissioners, and their fiscal policy or lack thereof should not have been excluded,” Schwartz said. “If the judge would have let that evidence in, the jury amount would have been larger.”
Once the county receives the transcript from the Superior Court trial — which could take up to 60 days — it will assemble that and other documents to form the record.
Both the county and the school board identify assignments of error in the case separately but must agree on the record of appeal, which is what the appellate court considers exclusively in its determination.
According to Schwartz, the Court of Appeals could decide the trial was conducted fairly, that there were “problems with the trial but not reversible error” or that the case should be sent back to Superior Court with instructions for further trial proceedings.
If the three-member panel of appellate judges does not reach a unanimous verdict, both sides have the right of appeal to the Supreme Court, Schwartz said. If either side wished to appeal a unanimous verdict, the slighted party could petition the Supreme Court to hear the matter, Schwartz said, and the Supreme Court would have that option.
 |
||
| Grandparents Day revives memories of fun, food, family |
tunne rat wrote on Jul 6, 2009 8:55 PM:
that is the biggest propganda word that every came out of butterfields and rino jones mouth in the past hundred years .
just 2 water boys for the obama socalist party , and a hand full of red necks that dont have a clue about whast they are talking about . "