SOSSI PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: ARE COMMISSIONERS BITING?

By Juan Montoya
It started innocently enough.
City of Brownsville city manager Charlie Cabler told the local daily and the residents of the city that Mark E. Sossi, who had impressed a majority of the commissioners with his defeat at the hands of Luis Sorola over the charter benefits issue, would be the commission's counsel at a paltry $10,000 monthly retainer.
At $120,000 annually, it was a plum for any attorney coming as it was at the end of the halcyon days of personal injury and consumer product liability awards.
The contract – at five paragraphs – was a rather straightforward document. The city will pay Sossi or any successor firm to which he belongs $10,000 a month as a retainer. As a contract attorney, he will not be entitled to any employment benefits including insurance or cell phones. There is also no mention of mileage reimbursement or travel.
Furthermore, Sossi "will continue to represent the city on all pending legal matters he was representing the City prior to his being retained...an any work which is performed after his being retained...shall be covered by the monthly retainer..."
The only exception to this, the contract states, "shall be the case of the City of Brownsville vs Zimmerman Construction Co. which shall not be included in the retainer."
The last paragraph in the contract states that the retainer "shall not cover the cost of any travel that the city attorney might be required to do on behalf of the city as might be authorized by the city commission or the city manager as appropriate."
The simple document seems to be rather cut and dried, it would appear.

However, questions have been raised over the payments made to Sossi during the past year. City commissioners and the city manager have been shown check register records that indicate that Sossi has received much more than the $10,000 monthly retainer stipulated in the contract. In a Aug. 25 letter, Argelia Miller showed the commissioners cases where two identical checks were issued on the same day, and in another case, two identical checks issued one day apart. Other entries show much larger payments made to Sossi over the same time period.

Sossi has countered that the payments are in compliance with his contract.
The city has been paying Sossi (DBA as Good Government Law Firm) $120,000 a year since March 2009.

That does not include another $5,000 monthly paid to him by the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation (GBIC) a city entity. That totals to $180,000 a year for part time work.
While this is simmering on the surface, the budget request that Sossi submitted for this office for the 2010-2011 budget year inflates his contract costs way past the initial bait of $120,000.
According to city records available online, Sossi is asking a couple of things more for his proposed budget for 2010-2011.
He will ask the city commissioners to allot an additional $40,000 for extra help. another $50,000 for professional services, $3,000 for communications ($250 a month for a cell phone?), $2,000 for travel, $4,200 in personal auto allowance ($350 a month) and $3,600 for training.

In short, it would appear that a bait-and-switch ruse is in the works over at city legal. If we add the $120,000 to the additional $62,600 in budget requests for his office, the total comes to $182,600 for that office for 2010-2011.

Add in the additional help in the person of his two two assistant city attorneys John E. Chosy( $79,996 a year) and Allison Ann Bastian ($45,240 a year), and the office budget has risen to $304,836.

This is a deal? And will the city commissioners take the bait?