You Dance with the One that Brought You: The Story of Tampa’s City Council Attorney

I had the honor of serving as Council Member Lynn Hurtak’s appointee to Tampa’s Charter Review Advisory Commission. I learned a lot over the nine months or so the commission considered various changes to the city’s charter. The purpose of this and future articles in this charter review series is to share some of what I’ve learned with the public. My goal is not to persuade the reader, but to provide insight to future voters on the issues we discussed.

Every city council needs an attorney. Voters put elected officials in seats not because of their legal acumen, but because they have a vision and a mission people get behind. The torrent of municipal contracts, land-use rulings, policy decisions, and sometimes complex legal procedures demands a doctor of law be on hand at all times to assist our local legislators in conducting the business of government.

In most municipalities, an attorney from the city’s legal department advises the city council during meetings. Tampa is different. For about half a century the city council has picked a staff attorney just for itself. How Tampa’s city council got its own attorney is just one episode in a long contest for power between the city’s “strong mayor” and a council that chafes under the limits of its authority.

The language in the charter defining the role has changed over the years to cement the city council’s authority over it. The charter initially defined the position as a “legal aide” to the city council. It referred to this legal aide as an assistant city attorney appointed by the council with the concurrence of the mayor. The city attorney could ask this legal aide to perform tasks as long as the chairman and council agreed. The mayor could fire the legal aide as long as four city council members voted with the mayor. Over the years the “assistant city attorney” references were scrapped, “legal aide” was replaced with the more possessive “city council attorney”, and the mayor now plays no part in hiring or firing this individual.

The 1975 charter fight

The city council attorney’s story begins in 1974, the year the public voted in Council Member Jan Platt who campaigned on untangling Tampa’s convoluted charter to make it more accessible to the public. At the time, the charter was a nearly 500-page tome, what Platt called a “hodgepodge” of charter provisions and corresponding legislation scattered throughout the book. With a charter revision on the table, the council saw an opportunity to strengthen its independence by establishing its own separate legal counsel.

Platt and other members of the city council felt the city attorney favored the mayor. They doubted whether the city attorney could represent both branches of government fairly should a dispute arise. The majority of the council wanted the body to have its own attorney. In 1975 the city council endorsed a bill by local State Senator Guy Spicola amending the charter to allow it to hire its own attorney.

Spicola agreed with council members’ take on the city attorney’s impartiality, calling it a “blatant conflict of interest” for the city attorney to represent both the city council and mayor. “You can’t represent both people in a divorce case, and you can’t represent the council and the mayor when they disagree,” Spicola said. Spicola saw the city council attorney as reinforcing the independence granted to the city council in the charter. Ed Blackburn, state representative from Temple Terrace and one-time candidate for mayor of Tampa, said the city council needed its own attorney so it wouldn’t be a rubber stamp for the administration.

Mayor Bill Poe and City Attorney Henry Williams strongly opposed the effort. Mayor Poe confronted Spicola in Tallahassee, and a “heated discussion” ensued. He, like Williams, thought the possibility of opposing legal opinions would be disastrous for the city. “I would be opposed to any bill that didn’t leave the total legal authority in the city attorney,” Poe said.

City Attorney Williams pushed back against the city council’s claims of bias. “I’m not the mayor’s attorney and I’m not the city council’s attorney — I’m the City of Tampa’s attorney,” Williams argued.

Council members did not unanimously favor the idea either. Council Member Catherine Barja did not back the position, and Council Member Charlie Miranda opposed the role, voicing concern over potential lawsuits between the administration and the city council. Council Member Lee Duncan withdrew his support after reading Spicola’s bill.

The local state delegation’s rules required six out of nine state representatives and two out of three state senators to sign on for bills to be introduced to the legislature. Spicola’s bill ran into trouble when State Senator Julian B. Lane, a former mayor of Tampa, refused to sponsor it and forced a compromise. Spicola signed on to Lane’s version of the bill, which included a financial analyst position that Lane saw as useful to the council’s budgetary role. The compromise birthed the first iteration of Tampa’s city council attorney. In 1975 the voters passed a revised nine-page charter for the city, and the city council’s attorney became enshrined in law.

A rocky start

In May 1976 the city council hired its first attorney from a pool of 175 applicants on a 5-1 vote, with Miranda opposed on the grounds that he did not support the position in the first place. The council selected John Cicero, a former city attorney and political figure in 1950s Miami. He lasted a little over a year before he resigned in September 1977. According to The Tampa Tribune, council members were unhappy with his performance and would have fired him anyway. The city council voted to leave the position vacant after Cicero’s resignation.

In February 1979 the city council voted to appropriate funding to staff its attorney position. According to Mayor Poe, no funds were available and it would have to wait until budget discussions in October. In the meantime, former Tampa assistant city attorneys Mattias Blanco Jr. and Robert A. Tropp offered to split time between their private practice and City Hall to fill in as legal counsel, offering their services for a compensation of only $1. Blanco and Tropp saw the role as a “check and balance” between the council, mayor, and city attorney.

The move drew backlash from the city’s legal department, which disagreed with the council’s ability to hire a firm and warned that council members could be individually liable if they followed the duo’s legal advice. When Blanco and Tropp questioned the city attorney’s impartiality, the legal department said it followed a code of ethics and did not take orders from the mayor, council, or anyone else. The legal department released a statement refusing to recognize “the law firm of Blanco and Tropp as assistant city attorneys or as the legal aide to City Council as authorized by the charter.”

From Carr to Shelby

David Carr, a 29-year-old assistant city attorney leaving the legal department for private practice, picked up the part-time city council attorney gig in October 1979. Carr served as city council attorney for nearly two decades, earning high praise for his expertise and dedication. The city council fired Carr in 1998 after he and a sitting city council member were charged with conspiracy and extortion. The U.S. Attorney’s Office dropped the charges in 2001. The council wavered on filling the position after Carr’s departure, instead voting in 1999 to set aside a contingency in the budget in case it required outside counsel.

The conversation around the position did not stop, however. During Mayor Dick Greco’s tenure in 2002, Council Member Linda Saul-Sena stated City Attorney James Palermo informed her “the administration’s policy now was that we not have separate counsel.” In 2003, shortly after Mayor Pam Iorio’s first election, City Attorney Fred Karl urged the council not to appoint its own attorney, and the mayor publicly opposed the council hiring one. Instead, Karl offered Gina Grimes, chief assistant city attorney, as legal counsel. With Grimes’ resignation in 2004 and new City Attorney David Smith taking the helm, the council decided to move forward with its own staff replacement and exerted its control over the process of selecting an attorney. In the meantime, assistant city attorneys filled the role. In May 2004, Martin Shelby, a former lawyer in the attorney general’s office and Largo city commissioner for eight years, was selected to advise the council as his sole client. Shelby has been a fixture at city council meetings ever since.

Whose attorney?

The mayor chooses the city attorney, and the city council votes on that choice. Yet even with an approval process that requires agreement between the mayor and council, the city attorney’s ability to remain neutral in conflicts between the two has been called into question right up to the present day. And while the city council attorney and city attorney rarely cross swords, they have battled over the territory of legal authority before. In a city where the strength of the executive is measured against the jurisdiction of the legislature, the story of Tampa’s city council attorney has been defined by the city council’s desire to assert its independence as much as by the mayor’s resistance to it. The city council’s doubt over the impartiality of the city attorney has risen time and time again, but when it comes to their own attorney, as the old saying goes, “you dance with the one that brought you.”