This morning's Standard-Examiner reports that the Emerald City Council has retained Salt Lake Attorney H. Craig Hall, to represent the council's interests in connection with the "proposed" Peterson/Boss Godfrey landgrab. Mr. Hall is a partner in the firm Chapman and Cutler, LLC, and has substantial government experience in municipal law, as set forth in the thumbnail resume on his firm's website:
Craig Hall is a partner in Chapman and Cutler LLP's Salt Lake City office. Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Hall held positions as City Attorney for South Salt Lake Corporation from 1998-2002; City Attorney for Murray City Corporation from 1977-1998 and Assistant City Attorney/Prosecutor for Murray City Corporation from 1975-1977. Mr. Hall has extensive experience in representing cities, towns and municipalities, including general operations, property acquisitions, planning and zoning, employee relations, municipal utilities (water, sewer and power) and police and fire departments.Mr. Hall also appears to have been somewhat entwined in the politics of our old Big-Government land-grabbing pals, the Utah League of Cities and Towns . He is credited as having been a "presenter" for the ULCT 2005 annual conference, and also apparently authored in 2002 a document entitled Eminent Domain Brochure, intended at the time to preserve the power of Big Government to seize Utah citizens' properties for the benefit of developers, and to "prevent the need for any eminent domain legislation."
Although it's a bit early in the game to predict the quality of representation that Mr. Hall will provide in connection with the Godfrey/Peterson scheme, we are not overjoyed at this point with the council's attorney selection. In a town (SLC) filled with real estate development lawyer expertise, it's not encouraging to know the council's chosen legal representative's experience is apparently founded on facilitating city administration-driven property acquistions.
As we learned from Tom Ellison's opening salvo in this matter, upcoming "negotiations" will be highly adversarial in nature.
We hope that Mr. Hall is up to the task of vigorously representing the interests of the taxpayers of Emerald City, and that he will not fall back to a city attorney mindset geared toward simply "making it all happen."
And what think our gentle readers about this?
