The firm then invoked the ordinance to try to collect a total of $20,000 in legal fees from the county for its clients. Zimmerman’s staff argued that the taxpayers were not entitled to reimbursement because they did not directly pay legal fees — the tax-appeal firm representing them did.

The state tax commission agreed with Zimmerman. Then the eight taxpayers filed a lawsuit in St. Louis County. In October 2017, a circuit court judge reversed the decision, agreeing with the plaintiffs and ordering the county to reimburse the legal fees. The case is pending in the state appeals court.

If the county loses, it will have to pay a total of $20,000 to the eight taxpayers. But Zimmerman’s office has spent more than $100,000 on outside lawyers because losing would give tens of thousands of tax appellants a huge advantage in future cases, and potentially overwhelm his staff.

Zimmerman said that the firm had “figured out that they could be clever … that if we didn’t settle a bunch of cases on favorable terms, whether they deserve to be settled or not, well then they’d just go looking to get attorney’s fees back on every single one of those hundreds or thousands of cases and thereby take hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars directly out of our budget.”