Less than a week after the Missouri attorney general sued a north St. Louis County fire district for banning people from public meetings, two residents were prevented from entering a fire board meeting Tuesday – one of whom was charged with assault – and a third was removed for allegedly scoffing.

For a couple of years now, the Post-Dispatch has had a vendetta going against the three men who are running the Northeast Fire District–which is to say that the paper reports on the fire district’s meetings, and such reporting yields damaging pr for the district, because those meetings are often, shall we say, spirited. The P-D crusade got started when two of the three board members hired Elbert Walton as the district’s lawyer. They’re currently paying him an annual $120,000 retainer, which is mighty interesting considering that the next highest retainer in any surrounding fire district is $24,000.

The Post editorial page, on the other hand, goes well beyond mere reporting. An op-ed piece entitled “The Northeast Rip-off and Fire Protection District” points out that the “tame fire board members” are only nominally in charge. In practice, they are Elbert Walton’s “pet rocks”. He got his two cronies elected, and they do his bidding.

The newspaper and a number of residents in the district have shed enough light on the situation that now the district is being sued. Twice. Not only is the attorney general after the three men for keeping people out of meetings in violation of the state Sunshine Law, but the state auditor is also suing them, for ignoring a subpoena for their records. However, it may well be that Walton revels in the lawsuits. Because now the fire district really needs his services. Who knows how much he’ll soak them for next year?

Koster and Montee need to be aware that Walton will be a slippery quarry to tackle. He is shrewd. He may be unethical and willing to dance around the edge of what’s legal, but he knows a thing or ten about protecting his flank. He’s made a practice of shutting people up about his high salary by not allowing them to speak at meetings. They can only speak if they get permission in advance by submitting a question in writing. If Walton finds the question in any way not to his liking, he refuses permission–and charges the district $200 an hour to write the supplicant a refusal to speak. Win/win for him, right?

His attitude toward any fire district residents who try to thwart him is, “Bring it on.” He runs a tight ship. The man who was arrested for third-degree assault, Kris Boevingloh, (the P-D article shows him being cuffed) is a local attorney who has been banned from meetings. When, insisting on his right to free speech, Boevingloh tried to move past the arresting officer to the door into the building, “‘He made contact with me,’ the officer said.” Ooh. Scary stuff. Probably brushed the cop with his elbow, and we all know the kind of damage loose elbows can do.

Then there was the man who–under a collared shirt–wore a t-shirt that objected to the bond issues the district board keeps trying unsuccessfully to pass. He wasn’t allowed in until he removed the t-shirt. And one woman, omigod, scoffed during the meeting. She denies it, but she still had to leave. I’m not sure where the line lies that will get a person thrown out of a fire district meeting. A grim set of the mouth? A raised eyebrow? Unruly hair?

But Walton is unapologetic. In fact, he’s prepared.

The board has banned three residents for one year from district property.

In a statement e-mailed Monday to the Post-Dispatch, board attorney Elbert Walton Jr. said the board intends to seek dismissal of the attorney general’s and auditor’s suits. The statement says the board, having been faced with people disrupting meetings, passed an ordinance allowing the board to ban them.

“Under the attorney general’s theory,” said the statement, which quoted Walton, “a person like Cookie Thornton could not be barred from attending meetings of the Kirkwood City Council despite threatening council members with death or bodily harm, and thus he would be free to shoot up the council under the provisions of the Missouri Sunshine Law, if (Attorney General Chris) Koster is correct.”

This disagreement could drag through the courts for who knows how many years. Meanwhile Walton keeps raking the moolah in. But if the district can’t pass the bond issue, and if Walton is bleeding it dry, how will the board be able to pay the riot police that may be required to restrain unruly residents at future meetings?

photo of riot police courtesy of Flickr user michaelrighi under a Creative Commons license.

To fully appreciate Bert Atkins’ candidacy, first you have to know the backstory:

In late April, Democratic Representative Bruce Darrough (HD75 in North St. Louis County) unexpectedly withdrew from the primary race for his district. The other person who had filed in the primary was Representative Juanita Head Walton’s brother, Charles.

Uh-oh. Head’s brother-in-law, Elbert Walton, uses his Unity PAC to run a slate of candidates in North St. Louis County every election year. Sometimes when one of his people gets elected to a city council or fire department board, Walton is hired as that entity’s attorney and, lo and behold, it turns out that that poor city or that poor fire board needs extensive legal work at top prices. Not that they can afford it, but they pay. Boy, do they pay.

I’ve written about Walton:

here

here

here

and here.

Walton has made it plain that he wants more African-Americans in elected office. Unfortunately, his focus on race seems to have generated some bad results: allegations of racial intimidation have been leveled at Walton and his people from time to time. Just this week, an article in the Post-Dispatch chronicled the latest complaint from a white deputy chief who was nudged pretty hard into early retirement in the Northeast Ambulance and Fire District.  

When Darrough withdrew from the race last April, North St. Louis County progressives did not have to fret long over the prospect of Walton’s brother-in-law going unopposed in the primary. Anytime a representative withdraws after the filing date, filing immediately reopens. And the man who had been planning to run when Darrough was termed out in 2010 stepped up to the plate: Bert Atkins.

No Republican is running in the general; the primary is the last stop for this district this year. And Bert is the kind of person you want winning this primary. He’s focusing on health care, full funding for schools, and protecting working people, speaking of which: Bert is a working guy; he’s a machinist at Boeing, so he’s gotten quite a bit of labor support. Of the $12,265 he had taken in at the end of the second quarter, he had eleven  $325 contributions from labor groups, one from the MNEA, and others from various local Democratic groups.

If Unity PAC is helping out Charles Head, though, I don’t see it. Head filed a limited activity report with the Ethics Commission.

But enough about crass money matters. Let’s look at what Bert hopes to focus on as a representative.

On health care he hits the same theme that most Democrats are hammering home this year: that the Republican legislature has put its eggs into the tax credits for jobs basket, with little to show for it. And they’re paying for those tax credits with Medicaid cuts–cuts that have cost the state almost two billion dollars in federal matching funds so far.

And our Medicaid policy is so stingy that even those who can get it suffer from odd quirks in it. They can apply for an electric wheelchair, for example, but not for the batteries to run it. Anybody poor enough to eke Medicaid payments out of this state is going to be scrounging for pennies on the sidewalk in an attempt to pay for batteries. Same story with people who need oxygen. They can get the apparatus but not the oxygen bottles. We’re talking here about people who live on about $800 a month. They can eat and maybe have a roof or they can breathe. Some choice.

Bert is outraged about Republican hardheartedness. He’s also distressed at what they’ve done to the funding formula for schools. When Republicans rewrote the school funding formula, they allowed less for districts than many districts were currently drawing. That didn’t mean that such districts suddenly got less money, but it did mean that they could get no raises in funding until such time as the built in annual increases caught up with them.

If District A, for example, had been getting $10 million a year from the state, the new formula might say the district was entitled to $8 million, with annual increases built in to account for inflation. Until those annual increases finally inched up to $10 million for District A, that school system would get no annual raises. Their income would be frozen for years, thus throwing the burden of new costs onto local property tax payers. (And by the way, Republicans are now howling about the unfairness of rising property taxes.) You can see the rock and the hard place wedging in our schools.

The beauty of the full funding change, from a Republican perspective, is that it’s complicated enough that few citizens will comprehend how their schools got screwed–and who is responsible.

Bert is incensed.

And, finally, he wants to stop Republican attacks on working people. He’s proud of the union movement’s commitment in this arena. Unions worked, for example, to get the minimum wage raised, even though union members make much more than the minimum wage.

Bert’s out there knocking on doors every week. He’s got eleven more days to get his message out. He says that at bottom his message is that he tries to conduct his life so that any part of it that came to light could go into a front page newspaper headline without embarrassing him–or his mother.

Maybe Charles Head feels the same way. I don’t know. All I know about him is that he has no background politically, but that he has a brother-in-law I wouldn’t trust as far as I can spit.

Last week, Elbert Walton Jr. uttered lines even Yogi Berra might be proud of: “You don’t have the right to go into public places. Public places are not public. They’re private.”

A Wednesday Post-Dispatch editorial laid into Elbert Walton for trying to keep residents out of the (public) Normandy Fire District board meetings. They complain too much and too loudly. Walton plans to hire an off duty County cop to arrest any residents who fail to exhibit all the decorum he deems proper.

And what do these impolite residents have to kvetch about?

As Elizabethe Holland of the Post-Dispatch has reported, in his first six months as the district’s attorney, Mr. Walton billed Northeast taxpayers for $76,671 in legal fees. That was six times more than his predecessor billed in an average year. Even by the loosey-goosey standards that govern many of the area’s dozens of fire districts, Mr. Walton’s bill is steep. The median for legal fees in those districts is $20,000 – per year.

Mr. Walton’s contract with the district – a contract he wrote – also provides him with life, health and accident insurance, along with other fringe benefits. Assuming he keeps billing at his current rate – “There’s a lot more work to be done,” he has said – the district could be spending as much as 7.5 percent of its $2 million annual budget on his legal fees.

And here’s the sweetest part: The more people complain about it, the more money Mr. Walton makes. Anyone who wants to ask the board a question at a district meeting (not counting its unannounced meetings at the Berkeley Steak ‘n Shake) must do so in writing. Mr. Walton then writes a letter in reply, at $200 an hour for his services. If the person making the inquiry has been labeled as disruptive, Mr. Walton writes a letter – at $200 an hour – saying he won’t answer any questions until the person writes the board an apology.

The Post points out that the fire district is getting “hosed.”

I have only one point to add to the Post’s excellent editorial, and that is that Walton runs a large slate of African-American candidates in North St. Louis County in every election. As that area turns increasingly black, the voters there need more black representation, according to Walton and his wife, Rep. Juanita Head Walton.

That’s probably true, and I have no problem with more representative representation.  Unless the candidates who get elected see to it that Walton is hired. In that case, they’re not doing their constituents–of whatever race–any favors.

The high-priced legal work Elbert Walton has been performing for the Normandy Fire District is reminiscent of what happened when he worked as the attorney for the City of Berkeley in the late nineties.

He and then mayor (now state rep), Ted Hoskins, ran the city. According to a 1999 article in the Post-Dispatch:

For more than a year, Walton and Hoskins have been almost inseparable in running Berkeley. They took Berkeley through one lawsuit after another and engaged in unusual practices, such as giving the oath of office to the second-place finisher (Hopper) in a council race and insisting that Hoskins was mayor, after he was recalled in a citywide election.

But their alliance began to unravel at a council meeting one February evening in 1999 when longtime resident Manuel “Ink” Levin complained that Walton’s legal bills were awfully high.

Hoskins refused to discuss the bills, but Walton said they were public information.

Walton was unapologetic about bills totaling nearly $400,000 and said he deserved to be paid for his work.  At that point, Hoskins conceded that Walton’s bills were excessive, called for a closed session of the council, and voted with the others to fire Walton. The dismissal apparently didn’t faze Walton, though. He delivered a blistering, hour-long speech against Hoskins while the council was in closed session. Once the closed session ended and the firing was official, Walton insisted that the action was illegal because the council had failed to vote in public, as required.  

“I’m not going anywhere,” Walton said in an interview. “I’m not turning over any of my cases. Ted Hoskins can’t tell me nothing. He can’t tell nobody what to do.”

And in a way he was as good as his word.  He sued the city of Berkeley for wrongful dismissal. That court case dragged through three appeals and was settled only last May by the Missouri Supreme Court in favor of the city of Berkeley.  But even after all that, a legal glitch allows Walton to pursue the case again if he chooses:

Walton will now take his case back to trial court for a fourth shot at an impoverished neighborhood that can hardly afford the expense.

Is the moral of Walton’s history with the city of Berkeley that the Normandy Fire District may be saddled with a very expensive albatross?  Perhaps.

At least in Normandy, Walton’s allies have not deserted him, and thus the community is taking aim at the two fire board members who hired him rather than at Walton himself directly.  That’s a safer course of action.  

My advice to any new board members who might replace Joe Washington and Robert Edwards is that if the board decides to dismiss Walton, it hire a competent lawyer to examine his contract with the board to make sure that any dismissal will stand up in court.  Because, as an acquaintance of mine pointed out about Walton, “He files lawsuits by the gross.”

Former state representative Elbert Walton, husband of state rep Juanita Head Walton, organized Unity PAC in 1996 to get more African-American candidates elected to office in north St. Louis county. He wants his allies in high office and low and aims at everything from state senator to fire district board member or local committee person. (In fact, his wife is a Democratic committeewoman.)

His goal of achieving more diversity among elected officials might be laudable if it weren’t for some of the perks his people have been lavishing on him.  The Post-Dispatch published two articles about Walton in the last month having to do with his work as a lawyer for the Normandy Fire District.  Both pieces were solid investigative reports. Kudos to the P-D.

The articles paint a picture of a lawyer (Walton), hired by two members of the three member fire district board in Normandy, who is charging the district unusually large sums. The two board members who hired him are Board president Joe Washington and newcomer Robert Edwards, who was elected with the backing of Walton’s Unity PAC. (These two are trying to oust the other board member, Bob Lee.)

Walton is charging the fire district more than five times as much money as the district’s previous lawyer ever charged. From the beginning of April until the end of October, his bills totaled $76,671. The previous lawyer, Mary Creamer, charged an average of $12,000 a year, with 2002 as the most expensive year at $23,000.  So far, Walton is on track to earn about $120,000 for a year’s work. “A Post-Dispatch survey regarding the pay of nine attorneys who represent 22 area fire districts found the highest annual pay about $45,000….”

Walton bills the district at $200 an hour and receives generous benefits:

In Walton’s contract, written by him, he is allowed an annual retainer of $18,000 and perks such as “life insurance, accident, sickness, health, disability, annuity, length of service, pension, retirement and other employee-type fringe benefits.”

Walton justifies his bills by explaining that the district needed a lot of reorganizing and that he expects to continue billing at about the same rate.

Walton said what he’s been paid “has nothing to do with whatever other fire districts are doing.” He emphasized that Normandy is a district “with a lot of issues.”

One of those issues is the friction between the board and Normandy residents, and one of the minor  reasons for that friction is that residents aren’t allowed to ask the board questions directly but are required instead to fill out “patron participation forms” that are given to Walton.  

That practice accounts for some of his billing, since he charges the board to answer the written questions–that’s if he answers them.  If he deems their questions insufficiently polite, he refuses:

“Your discourtesies and disrespectful approach to the board warrants no response to your form, comments and inquiries,” Walton wrote to Mike Britt of Pasadena Hills after a board meeting at which Britt referred to Joe Washington as “Joey.” Walton’s letter informed Britt that any questions or comments he had would not be acknowledged until he submitted a “written apology” to the board.

But the more important sources of friction in the district are Walton’s pay and the constant use of closed sessions called by Washington and Edwards. In fact, four residents have filed a lawsuit against the board for violations of the Sunshine Law. Furthermore, a group of residents is organizing an effort to recall board members Joe Washington and Robert Edwards, the two who regularly vote to go into closed session.

Closed sessions, of course, are not illegal, but the Sunshine Law lists 15 subjects that may be discussed in closed session and requires that boards announce the specific reason for a closed session. Washington and Edwards, always over Bob Lee’s objections, call the closed sessions without explaining the reasons.

The Attorney General’s office has been looking into the residents’ complaints and discussing the problem with the board. Nixon’s spokesman, Scott Hulste, points out that Walton “doesn’t agree with the state agency’s analysis of the law.”

It may strike you that Walton is skating close to the edge of legality, not to mention ethics, for the sake of his own profit.  If so, you’ll be interested to learn, from future postings, that the brouhaha in Normandy is not Walton’s first brush with questionable behavior.

He is working to become a power player on the black political scene in north St. Louis county. He might need to find more subtle ways to profit, though, if he wants African-Americans in that part of town to continue backing his candidates.

Pictured above:  Left, Joe Washington; Right, Robert Edwards; Standing, Elbert Walton.  Photos courtesy of the Post-Dispatch.

Juanita Head Walton and her husband Elbert have become political powers in North St. Louis city and county.  That’s a shame because, although they are Democrats, they do much to harm the Democratic Party.
Juanita is the state rep from district 81.  Elbert holds no official elected position, but is the power behind a slate of candidates who will challenge incumbent Democrats in primaries next year.  Right there, the problem begins.  It’s difficult to say at present how many candidates for various offices Elbert will promote, but word on the street has it somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty.  Juanita plans to challenge Tim Green in district 13 for the state senate.  Other Walton candidates plan, for starters, to oppose Gina Walsh (state rep, St. Louis), Tony George (state rep, Florissant), and Mike O’Mara (county council). 

Other Walton candidates are likely to run to become committemen, fire board members, school board members, and such like.  A later post will explain how Elbert has made use of putting his people in such positions.

So incumbent Democrats in the north part of town will waste time and money on primaries.  That’s money that could have been spent in the general.  Elbert and Juanita would justify running candidate after candidate against incumbent Democrats by saying that they want African-American elected officials, and I don’t doubt that that goal plays a part in their activities. 

But even if you’re inclined to excuse their assault on their own party on the grounds that they have a right to want more black representation in public office, the Waltons have other marks against them.  First,  a portion of their funding comes from the Republican party.

Before the primaries for the 2006 election, Rex Sinquefield’s Show-Me Institute and his other organization,All Children Matter (at the time headed by Ed Martin, now Blunt’s chief of staff),  made it known that they would contribute several thousand dollars to any pro-voucher candidate who would challenge Maria Chappelle-Nadal.  And they got a taker:  someone from Walton’s camp.  News of this travesty so enraged local Dems that Maria had tons of support and won the primary easily.  But still, all those Democratic dollars and all that Democratic shoe leather could have been expended elsewhere.

The Walton Unity PAC regularly receives Republican donations, and why not?  Republicans may not have the best policy ideas, but you know they always have plenty of jack to spread around.  A wise use of their extra dough is to give it to Democrats and encourage them to fight among themselves.

It does, indeed, look as if we’ll be fighting among ourselves because this time around some of the Dems have decided it’s necessary to fight back.  A group of them have convened once already–and will meet every two weeks from here on out–with the express goal of planning strategy to keep the Waltons from taking incumbents by surprise next year, as they did in several races last year.

The way their committee sees it, Democrats should work to keep incumbents in office, unless those office holders have shown they don’t deserve party support.  To regularly challenge incumbents–sometimes with Republican money, no less!–destroys our unity and sometimes hands the Republicans victories they don’t deserve.