Palm Springs backs off hiring Silver & Wright, law firm behind ‘prosecution fees' in Indio and Coachella

Palm Springs City Hall nearly hired a law firm that has been criticized for charging exorbitant fees to unsuspecting residents in the eastern Coachella Valley, but a contract with the firm was pulled from a city council meeting agenda shortly before it was set for approval in a routine vote on Wednesday night.

The Palm Springs City Council was on the verge of hiring Silver & Wright, a firm that specializes in recovering legal costs from property owners, to target the city's most problematic blighted properties, like vacant lots and abandoned buildings.

Silver & Wright was hired by Coachella and Indio for similar purposes a few years ago. The Desert Sun recently revealed that the law firm, empowered by those city contracts, billed residents who committed very minor crimes more than a total of $122,000 in “prosecution fees” – making them pay to prosecute themselves. The firm also assisted Coachella in heavily fining a 91-year-old woman who was dying of dementia because she owned a nuisance property.

INVESTIGATION: They confessed to minor crimes. Then City Hall billed them $122K in 'prosecution fees'

MORE: She was 91 and dying of dementia. City Hall fined her $39K. Now it says her family must pay.

At Wednesday's Palm Springs City Council meeting, the Silver & Wright contract was initially placed on the council’s “consent calendar,” a portion of agenda that is reserved for routine, non-controversial decisions. Generally, council members adopt the entire consent calendar with a single vote and zero debate. If a council member believes a consent calendar decision requires more thought, it can be moved to the regular agenda.

In this case, the Silver & Wright contract was yanked from the agenda in the first few minutes of the council meeting. City Attorney Edward Kotkin, who first proposed the contract, recommended its removal but did not provide any explanation. The council never discussed the contract again.

In an interview on Thursday, Kotkin said the contract was not pulled as a result of Desert Sun reporting. He said the contract may still be reconsidered later.

“With respect to your stories, I have reviewed them prior to the city council meeting,” Kotkin told The Desert Sun. “Your articles had no bearing on my decision to pull the agenda item.”

An explanation for the reversal instead came from Councilman Geoff Kors, who said he urged Kotkin to remove the contract because it was redundant.

City Hall is actively recruiting a deputy city attorney who would have the same duties as Silver & Wright, Kors said.

"My main concern was hiring any law firm when we know that we will have someone in-house who could do this," Kors said.

Kors, who is a lawyer himself, also said he wanted Palm Springs to resist the tactic of criminally prosecuting nuisance property owners, as Silver & Wright has done in Indio and Coachella. But the councilman stressed that these strategic decisions were ultimately up to the cities themselves, not the attorneys they hire.

“It’s hard to know what other cities are thinking or their reasoning,” Kors said. “Sometimes you need all the tools and weapons in your arsenal to get the results, but my view for Palm Springs is that we would want to do everything we can do to first get compliance before going that route.”

In November, a Desert Sun investigation revealed that Silver & Wright had been criminally prosecuting Indio and Coachella residents for small nuisance crimes – like a junk-filled yard or selling popsicles without a business license – then billing the residents thousands of dollars in “prosecution fees.” The bills grew even larger when the law firm added litigation fees, investigation fees, staff costs and appeal costs.

In most of those cases, the disparity between the crime and the cost was staggering. Defendants who faced no jail time and were fined only a few hundred dollars ended up paying five or ten times that much to prosecutors who attended a couple of court hearings. A Coachella family with a busted garage door and an overgrown, junk-filled yard was billed $25,000. An Indio man who sold parking on his land without a business license was billed $5,000. After an Indio woman hung a Halloween decoration on a streetlight in front of her house, Silver & Wright attempted to bill her $4,200.

Once revealed, this “prosecution fee” tactic quickly drew criticism from both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Institute of Justice. Several local defense attorneys said Silver & Wright was taking advantage of residents by getting them to plead guilty to the smallest crimes without realizing they would later be billed for the cost of prosecution.

“It’s absolutely a scam – you can quote me on that,” said defense attorney Leonard Cravens, who represented an Indio businessman who was billed $25,000 by Silver & Wright. “They pick the most expensive way to get the job done, in criminal court, because it’s all about the money.”

Last week, a follow-up Desert Sun investigation revealed that Silver & Wright had also helped Coachella City Hall heavily fine a 91-year-old woman, Marjorie Sansom, who was dying of dementia. Sansom owned a vacant lot that had become a public nuisance. The city mailed Sansom more than a dozen citations, but sent them all to a house where she did not live and never informed her family or legal guardian about her growing debt.

Silver & Wright later took Sansom to court – unaware she had passed away – and sent her a bill for $39,000, which was also mailed to the wrong address. When she didn’t respond, the law firm placed a lien on her property, leaving her family to either pay off the dead woman’s debt or lose her land.

Palm Springs’ proposed contract with Silver & Wright appears similar to the contracts the law firm inked with Indio and Coachella. A staff report said the law firm would “likely focus on nuisance abatement, code enforcement and cost recovery,” just like the others.

However, a close review of the contracts does reveal one key difference. The Indio and Coachella contracts specifically mention the possibility of prosecuting property owners in criminal court. The Palm Springs contract does not.

Palm Springs Mayor Rob Moon said he had read both Desert Sun stories involving Silver & Wright, but did not commit the name of the firm to memory and did not associate the firm with prosecution fees when their contract later came before the city council.

Moon also stressed that, because the contract was pulled from the agenda at the very beginning of the council meeting, he had not familiarized himself with the document.

“This was a minor administrative issue for me,” Moon said. “This was not on my radar screen, but I can tell you this is on my radar screen now.”

As the Silver & Wright contract was proposed, the city would be specifically hiring John Fujii, a former Huntington Beach city attorney who joined the law firm as a partner in 2016.

The proposed contract says Fujii would be paid $215 an hour, about $20 to $40 more per hour than the Silver & Wright attorneys who work for Indio or Coachella.

Investigative reporter Brett Kelman can be reached at 760 778 4642 or by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter @tdsBrettKelman.