EDITORIAL: The high cost of bad legal advice
Behind a closed door in a quiet room somewhere in Kootenai County, fingertips play with numbers.
They’re not all big numbers, but when you add them up, once every month, each bite demonstrates how you eat an elephant.
The fingertips belong to new North Idaho College attorney Art Macomber, whose "expertise" is real estate. Applying the new math of the political circles in which Macomber moves, expertise is not part of the equation.
Instead, it’s:
Extreme viewpoints + bully instincts + crony allegiances = hell, you’re hired!
Qualifications? They don’t need no stinkin’ qualifications. If you’re the three amigos ruining NIC, Art Macomber’s resume is pure gold.
And we do mean gold.
Going back to the night of Dec. 5, 2022, when Macomber was awkwardly hired by Todd Banducci, Greg McKenzie and Mike Waggoner, the fingertips have been profitably busy.
Charging $325 an hour to do a job for which he is poorly equipped — some would say that Macomber is more of a liability than an asset, based on the early returns of his work performance — the college’s attorney has rung up bills of $24,797.50 for December, $22,510.18 for January and $26,659.58 for February.
According to the old math, that’s $73,967.26 for less than three months of what’s supposed to be part-time work.
Old math also suggests the sum is outlandish.
Before Macomber unwisely advised trustees to go ahead and shove duly hired President Nick Swayne to the side but keep paying him while bringing in interim President Greg South and paying him even more than Swayne was making, before Macomber was writing his own job description and whipping out witch-hunt subpoenas like a drunk blackjack dealer, his predecessor was doing the job right.
But because attorney Marc Lyons saw that the radical new board majority wanted to tar and feather him and the institution they allegedly served, Lyons resigned as NIC counsel. He was, after all, highly experienced and eminently qualified, which adds up to zero in the new math employed by Banducci, McKenzie and Waggoner.
Lyons undercharged NIC for the 23 years he served the college because he believed so ardently in its value to the community. According to public records acquired by The Press, Lyons’ law firm, Lyons O’Dowd, charged NIC the following for the last four years, with numbers rounded to nearest thousands:
2019: $44,000
2020: $36,000
2021: $70,000
2022: $92,000
The overall escalation includes increasing its hourly rate between 2019 and 2022 because of the rapid rise of legal work stemming from troubling governance issues, rather than the standard slate of operational issues that college attorneys usually face.
Thank you, Mr. Banducci.
The bottom line is that on average, NIC got a full year of sound legal guidance from Lyons for well under what Macomber has charged for less than three months of bad advice. At the current rate, Macomber will bill NIC more than $296,000 for his first year as the college’s part-time, contracted legal counsel.
Old math says that’s a rotten deal for everyone except Art Macomber and the three trustees striving to bankrupt North Idaho College.