,
14 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
Thread incoming about the effort to shrink #BearsEars, a $500/hour attorney, and a mysterious $109K payment that went missing and is now being returned to the poorest county in Utah. (And about the benefits of local journalism, or how I became a believer in my own career.) 1/
I recently made an open records request to obtain forty pages of invoices a high-priced Louisiana law firm charged San Juan County, UT in 2017. The firm was primarily lobbying to reduce the newly created Bears Ears Nat'l Monument 2/ sltrib.com/news/2019/07/2…
The lead attorney, George Wentz, charged the county $500 an hour to make plane flights across the country, to set up meetings with a uranium company, and to hold regular phone calls with the conservative think tank the Sutherland Institute. 3/
The firm, Davillier Law Group, also worked to get packets of info in front of then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and President Trump himself. 4/
San Juan County, the poorest in Utah, paid $480K for the services. Many other groups and the state of Utah were also lobbying to cut the monument, so it's not clear whether Davillier played a key role in Trump's decision to slash Bears Ears by 85% in Dec. 2017. 5/
What is clear is that they were expensive. In a single day, Wentz billed for over 17 hours of work for total of $8,285. Davillier also diverted $25K-$75K a month to subcontractors who played unknown roles. 6/
But for me the most interesting part of reporting this story was my discovery that San Juan County accidentally paid one of the bills TWICE, overpaying the law firm by $109K in May 2017. 7/
Neither of the county officials who signed off on the invoice caught the mistake, and neither, apparently, did the firm. Thanks to the @sltrib running this article, the money is now being refunded to the county. 8/
Study after study shows that as local newspapers close or bigger newspapers lose staff, voters become less informed, voter turnout drops, and local governments become less cautious with their use of funds, i.e. borrowing and corruption increase. 9/ cjr.org/united_states_…
Makes sense. There was nothing particularly impressive about what I did in this case; anybody with the same documents could have written a similar article and discovered the extra payment. The key factor was that the Tribune and @report4america hired someone to start digging. 10/
This experience made something clear to me. We need to stop thinking about a newspaper subscription like a Netflix subscription. It's not just about entertainment. 11/
A digital Tribune subscription costs $8/month. If aren't reading your local paper daily, you may feel like you aren't getting your money's worth. But, who knows, you could be saving more on your tax bill down the line. 12/
It's great national outlets pay people like @JamesCTobias to FOIA inner workings at the Interior Department. Or reporters like @annehelen and @grahambrewer to come to places like San Juan County to report: buzzfeednews.com/article/annehe…
But it's also necessary to have people on the ground, day after day, attending the meetings and requesting docs. So thanks for reading this thread and the news. And a shout out to all you newspaper subscribers out there--thanks for keeping me employed at the best job I've had.
