Over the recent holiday season, the city and borough of Wrangell issued a RFP, or “request for proposal” for municipal legal services.
Borough Clerk Kim Lane explained that the borough assembly, by majority, opted to see what other legal representation could be available for Wrangell, as opposed to their current law firm Hoffman & Blasco. It was not that Wrangell was dissatisfied with this firm’s services, she said, they just wanted to see what other options there were.
The RFP went out to multiple lawyers, according to Borough Manager Lisa Von Bargen, and they received two replies. One response came from Scott Brandt-Erichsen out of Ketchikan. The other came from Joseph Levesque, from Anchorage. The Borough met in a workshop last Thursday, Jan. 17, to decide which lawyer was worth bringing to Wrangell for further interviews.
Before getting into business, Assemblymember Patty Gilbert said she had some concerns about how the RFP was handled. The deadline to respond to the request, she said, had only been 12 business days. That seemed like a very short timeframe, she said, especially over the holiday season. Von Bargen apologized for causing concern, but said she felt the two responses they got were very good. She also said that, in the future, they would set RFPs for a longer timeframe to respond.
Everyone on the assembly agreed that what they were looking for in their legal representation was someone who could make timely responses to questions, and who could simplify complicated matters. Mayor Steve Prysunka said he did not want a lawyer who would go on a long diatribe that went over his head. He wanted someone he could understand. He added that he favored Levesque, after reviewing the proposals sent to the borough. Assembly Member Jim DeBord agreed with the mayor. Gilbert, on the other hand, felt that Brandt-Erichsen was worth interviewing. Other assembly members asked why they could not bring both lawyers to Wrangell for an interview.
“If we only invite one, we’ve kind of made a decision,” said Assembly Member David Powell.
After further discussion, it was agreed that both lawyers should be brought to town for interviews.
The assembly then turned to the question of when and how the interviews should be conducted. The main question was whether the lawyers should be interviewed together or separately. Prysunka said that one of his concerns was stretching out the process of finding legal representation unnecessarily long. It was agreed upon by the assembly to interview both lawyers separately, but to keep those interviews as close together as possible. The tentative plan was made to invite both Levesque and Brandt-Erichsen to Wrangell at the end of the month and conduct one interview in the afternoon, after lunch, and the other interview either that evening or the next morning.
Once the workshop was complete, the assembly broke into a short executive session to hear an update on the progress of a formal grievance procedure with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a labor union the borough holds a collective bargaining agreement with.
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