Scott Neal, Eden Prairie City Manager

I authored the following commentary piece for the Eden Prairie Sun Current and the Eden Prairie News. I thought I’d share it in this space as well for my readers that don’t have access to those newspapers. It is about the City Council’s recent decision regarding the selection of the City Prosecutor.

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Commentary

Scott H. Neal, City Manager

September 22, 2006

For more than 20 years, the City has outsourced its criminal prosecution legal needs to the private law firm of Gregerson, Rosow, Johnson & Nilan. The firm has supplied several different lawyers over the years to serve as the official City Prosecutor in the Hennepin County Courts. The current City Prosecutor is Ms. Jennifer Inz.

In January of this year, the City Council directed City staff to study the manner in which the City was fulfilling its criminal prosecution legal needs. The Council specifically directed that staff study the feasibility of discontinuing the current outsourced prosecutor and bringing that service in-house by hiring more City employees. The Council also directed staff to study the advisability of continuing to outsource for our prosecution needs, but to conduct a competitive Request For Proposals (RFP) process to test the value of the City’s current relationship with the Gregerson Rosow firm.

At the City Council meeting last week, I presented the findings of the staff’s analysis and my recommendation on how to proceed. The staff analysis on these two issues led me to these conclusions:

First, we studied three cities (

Bloomington , Minnetonka and Coon Rapids ) that provide both civil and criminal prosecution legal services in-house with City employees. We also studied one city, Elk River , that outsources its civil legal work, but uses an in-house staff attorney as its criminal prosecutor. We compared staffing levels and operating costs from these cities to what we believed our costs would be here in Eden Prairie . We found no significant financial savings to the City from this model.

Second, we compared the costs of our current outsourced criminal prosecution legal contract with Gregerson Rosow to other comparable cities (

Apple Valley , Eagan , Burnsville , Edina , Maple Grove , Plymouth and Woodbury) that also outsource criminal prosecution legal work to private law firms. We found that our current prosecution contract, which we estimate at $255,000 in 2006, is about 8 percent higher than the average contract cost of these cities. In terms of our relative rank, our contract ranked #5 of these cities. In other words, we felt our contract was right in the market.

Third, seven private law firms submitted proposals in response to our RFP. We had two interview teams interview the three firms. One interview team was made up of Police Department employees. The other was made of up City Councilmembers, myself and two members of my management staff team. The interview teams conducted the interviews without knowing the cost proposals of the firms they were interviewing. We did this because we wanted interviewers to concentrate on reaching a judgment about which firm would provide the City with the best service. In this interviewing environment, the clear preference of both interview teams was the Gregerson Rosow firm.

Finally, it was my responsibility to synthesize the interview results with the cost analysis. In doing that I also took a look at two other factors. I confirmed that the City has a proposed criminal prosecution legal budget for 2007 of $249,850. The Gregerson Rosow proposal for 2007 is $240,000, so the City has adequate funds available for this proposal. And, taxes will not need to be raised to cover the cost of this contract in 2007.

I also did some analysis of the cost savings impact of selecting the lowest cost proposal in the RFP process, which was $120,000 for 2007. Disregarding whether or not that law firm could actually perform the service level we want for that cost, I ran the numbers. If the City saved $120,000 on this contract and passed every dollar of that savings back to property taxpayers, and assuming some other taxing body did not swoop in and snap up our tax savings, the median residential taxpayer in

Eden Prairie would have saved $4 per year in taxes if the City accepted the lowest cost law firm.

In my judgment, the tax savings was just not sufficient to risk the long-standing positive relationship the City has with its current outsourced prosecutor, the Gregerson Rosow law firm. The firm’s performance over the past two decades has been outstanding. It has the strong support of our Police Officers, which was a very important factor to me. The crimes prosecuted by our City Prosecutor – DUI, domestic abuse, traffic offenses, petty thefts – are the crimes that effect

Eden Prairie citizens. Our Prosecutor and our Police take these offenses seriously. They work closely together to make public safety in Eden Prairie the number one priority of city government.

For all these reasons, I recommended the City Council appoint the Gregerson Rosow firm to serve as the City’s official criminal prosecutor. The Council agreed and confirmed that choice on a 3-2 vote. It’s never an easy choice for elected officials to choose an option that costs more than another option, but in this case, the value outweighed cost.