“That’s why we have our legal consultants,” the former head of the Village Planning Board told me a couple of years ago when I challenged him on the questionable legality of a negative declaration that allowed a recent subdivision applicant to avoid a full SEQRA review.
As a management consultant, I always advise corporate executives to acquire sufficient knowledge of the laws that constrain their corporate decisions and actions, so that they will be able to manage their lawyers instead of their lawyers managing them.
Let’s look at a recent local political example of my doctrine of checking on lawyers: Less than a year ago, I advised our mayor, by memo, of the fact that two applications for McMansions were in direct conflict with a couple of New York State laws, and also in violation of the two applicants’ own deeds.
Politely and promptly, our mayor called me back, and said, with what sounded as if he felt virtuous for saying so: “I will not intervene!”
How interesting: “I will not intervene!” has a legalese sound to it, doesn’t it?
If our mayor’s decision resulted from him accepting the advice of a lawyer, I will gladly throw that lawyer under the bus: That lawyer obviously missed a week or two of first-year law school lectures about the doctrine of respondeat superior. That respondeat superior doctrine, applied to the situation above, simply states that, by law, the mayor, as head of our local government, is responsible for any illegal actions by any of the persons he has appointed and/or by the government bodies or agencies that operate under his authority.
Hey, I’m not suggesting that the dedicated members of our Village Board of Trustees or the brave and hard-working volunteers appointed to our village regulatory boards have to go to law school. Of course not. I am saying that they should have some familiarity, in layman’s terms, with the state and local laws that impact their decisions, sufficient to have alarms go off if their assigned lawyers give them bad advice.
A current trustee recently asked me, “How do you get better answers from lawyers?”
“By asking better questions,” I told her.
Evelyn Konrad
Attorney-at-law
Southampton
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