Well, well. There were more complaints about legal fees during the March 9, 2026, city council meeting. As usual, no one on the council asked any intelligent questions about charges. They just like to give lip service to the bills and move on.
City officials would like you to believe that all legal fees have accrued because of my husband’s election lawsuits and/or my FOIA requests. This is because the city officials always perceive themselves as the victim with no responsibility for anything that happens. These fees accrue because things are done to them, not because of things that were done by them.
But is that really true? Or do these things happen because of the city’s insistence on doing things in secret; wasting attorney time on non-attorney issues; fighting for the ability to unlawfully use city resources to convince Clarkston voters to vote a certain way on a ballot question (when they’re required by law to remain neutral); lying in official meeting records and on taxpayer-funded government television – about the effects of a ballot question; and some higher than expected attorneys’ fees from our “assistant’ city attorney, Kristen Kolb.
I’ll write, you decide.
Let’s first briefly look at the two election law lawsuits (and I mean very briefly since I discussed the details here and the purpose of this post is the focus on excessive attorney billing). There are two, both relating to city officials unlawfully using their public offices and taxpayer resources to put a thumb on the scale to convince Clarkston voters to vote no on a charter proposal that was: 1. designed to provide more protection to residents from overzealous historic district commission (HDC) members (like the former HDC chair who is still fighting off kiddie porn charges); and 2. would have required that city council have a say before the HDC goes off and embroils the city in litigation that costs taxpayers thousands of dollars as they did in the 42 West Washington case.
I’ll refer to the two lawsuits as the “special city council meeting case” and the “HDC case.”
In the special city council meeting case, the city knew or should have known a lawsuit would be inevitable because there were multiple discussions about why the special meeting was a really bad idea before it happened. Yet your city council chose to hold the meeting anyway. No surprise there, since the request for the meeting was driven by Ted Quisenberry, a city council member who provided financial support for the anti-charter proposal campaign, and Cara Catallo, who established the website for the anti-charter proposal campaign that was filled with false statements about the charter proposal. The whole point of the special city council meeting was to allow the rabid anti-HDC charter amendment people to use our taxpayer-owned city hall, official city council government meeting time, and taxpayer-funded Independence Television to repeatedly broadcast their public comments misrepresenting what the charter amendment would actually do.
The HDC case involves historic district committee study chair Nancy Moon’s unlawful use of her appointed position to solicit “Promotional Material to Stop the Petition” (yes, that was her actual email subject line). You’ll be delighted to know that in the HDC case, “assistant” city attorney Kolb is arguing that city officials should be able to say anything they want to the public about any ballot proposal, even if it’s a lie. With regard to Moon’s false public statements about the charter proposal that were made at an HDC meeting and inserted into the official minutes by Moon’s husband, Kolb says “whether or not the statement … was true or not is irrelevant to the question of whether there was a violation of the [Michigan Campaign Finance Act].” Since your city officials have recently disclosed that they want to put a tax proposal on the ballot in the near future to cover up for their fiscal mismanagement, no doubt city officials believe it’s imperative to defend their claimed right to lie to you about ballot proposals – and whether it’s an HDC-related proposal or a tax proposal makes no difference.
Though both election cases are being handled by my husband, I think it’s safe to say the city could resolve both cases tomorrow and incur no more legal expense by admitting that what they did was improper and promising not to do it again. But no. They want instead to fill their briefs with personal attacks having nothing to do with the merits of the cases and apparently want to convince the courts to rule in the city’s favor because the city is on the side of the angels and my husband, in their words, “has an axe to grind” and harbors “animosity against the City” that “is deep-seated and apparently unyielding.” To be fair, the city’s current attorneys, when we first met with them, did suggest “fact finding” or arbitration to resolve the cases last year, but that wasn’t a settlement offer. And neither of these options were palatable because they would be held in secret (which is the city’s preferred way of handling things), wouldn’t bind the city, would allow the city to walk away feeling vindicated, and let public officials in Clarkston (and across the state) to go out and lie to the public in the future. After the city filed its latest personal attacks, my husband talked to Gerry Fisher about the tone of the brief and suggested that there could be a settlement if the city would simply admit what it did was wrong and promise not to do it again. Fisher, the ostensible city attorney, knew nothing of the city’s brief and apparently isn’t really involved in any of the details of what is going on. Although he promised to speak to Kolb, the lawyer who’s actually driving the city’s litigation and FOIA costs, she never inquired about possible settlement. Thus the city’s answer to a suggestion of settlement is: “Forget it. You’re ass*****. We’re going to litigate this to the bitter end, no matter how much it costs or how long it takes.”
I should also mention the city’s previous set of attorneys acted in bad faith when we agreed to voluntarily facilitate the resolution of the payment of several hundred thousand dollars of attorneys’ fees and costs in my five-year FOIA lawsuit, lying to the judge about whether I’d agreed to the terms of a settlement agreement they wanted in an effort to secure a judicial order forcing me to sign an agreement I never agreed to. I’m not suggesting that Kolb or Fisher would act in bad faith; I’m simply saying the city as an entity has a history of acting like vermin while claiming to be on the side of sweetness and light.
At this point, “assistant” city attorney Kolb would have to take any actual settlement and resolution up with my husband. I don’t think that’s going to happen, because based on what I’ve read in court filings, she appears to be more interested in insulting him and billing as many hours as possible rather than talking to city officials about settling. I suppose it’s a matter of principle for the city, just like my five-year FOIA lawsuit was. You’ll remember that case ended up in the Michigan Supreme Court in large part because the city insisted on standing on principle. These two election cases have the same potential to go to the Michigan Supreme Court. The difference between the cases is there’s no insurance company to pay the city’s expenses in the election cases. I’ve been hoping the city would be less stupid with these cases, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Whatever, Clarkston. You do you boo. My husband isn’t paying monthly lawyer bills, you are. However, this is yet another reason why it’s become clear that Clarkston’s experiment playing at city government has failed and we should discuss the best way to combine with Independence Township.
But this post is about attorney overbilling, so let’s get to it.
It’s far easier to show overbilling in FOIA matters than in litigation matters because I can’t objectively prove how long it should take Kolb or a lower-level firm associate to research an issue or write a brief. But I do have one example from the HDC case that I can share so you can decide whether the amount of time Kolb billed was commensurate with the work involved.
My husband filed an application for leave to appeal a circuit court decision to the Michigan court of appeals. This meant that the Secretary of State (who is also a party in the case) and Kolb had 21 days to file an answer, but they could ask the court for more time to answer. The Secretary of State asked for a 28-day extension of time. Kolb asked my husband if he would object if the city also asked for an equal extension, and he told her he wouldn’t. (He almost never objects because extensions are usually freely given by attorneys to each other as a courtesy.) Asking the court of appeals for a 28-day extension of time to answer involves filing a one-page fill-in-the-blanks form that doesn’t require higher level attorney thinking and could easily be prepared by a paralegal or legal secretary and given to the attorney to review and sign. But that’s not what happened.
Here is the one-page form filed by Kolb on December 18, 2025 (that also included attorney emails discussing the extension) asking for more time. It’s basically copied from the Secretary of State’s form (linked above), filed two days before. The reason she gave for needing the extension was that she was too busy with other matters and deadlines to answer within the standard allowed 21 days:
The January 26, 2026, city council packet shows that Kolb personally billed Clarkston for half an hour ($75) to complete the form I’ve inserted above with the charges spread out over two days. You can tell it was Kolb’s billing because of the initials “KBK”:
Do you think this simple form should have taken half an hour of attorney time to prepare? Why wasn’t it delegated to a legal secretary or a paralegal? An even more pointed question is whether Clarkston should be billed for any attorney time because the reason Kolb wanted more time to respond was due to the “number of matters [Kolb] is handling with forthcoming deadlines” – if these other matters weren’t Clarkston’s matters, why should Clarkston be charged legal fees for Kolb’s extension of time?
You’ll notice the December 17, 2025, time entry shown above also includes billed time for “multiple correspondence with R. Bisio regarding same.” “Regarding same” in a block billing entry means Kolb was specifically billing only for the time she spent sending and reviewing correspondence between her and my husband relating to her completion of the one-page “motion to extend time” form. Here is all the correspondence between Kolb and my husband regarding the motion to extend time:
Oh, and the city was also billed $103 to file this one-page form motion as noted in the January 26, 2026, city council packet:
All told, the city was charged $178 for Kolb to draft a one-page form that a legal secretary could have prepared plus a filing fee that cost more than the work billed – because Kolb had too many deadlines that were likely not due to Clarkston legal work. Do you think that’s OK?
How about Kolb’s bills for FOIA work? That’s something I can provide more information about and I’ll go back to the requests made since former city attorney Tom Ryan was (thankfully) replaced.
May 14, 2025, FOIA request:
I made a request for copies of two things, one of which was the grant applications city manager Jonathan Smith filed asking for federal funds to repair sidewalks and aprons in downtown Clarkston (with an overall estimated project cost of more than $1.5 million). This project would repave the entire downtown area, benefit only the downtown businesses, and would require a 20% taxpayer match of at least $300,000 – money we don’t have for a problem that could be remedied by purchasing matching brick pavers on a few driveway aprons. The second request related to Smith’s efforts to hire clerk Angela Guillen and asked for a record showing how much Smith was proposing to have taxpayers pay in salary and benefit increases for city employees in the 2026-2027 budget. (FYI, Guillen wasn’t interested in working here unless we paid for her health insurance and Smith deliberately did not disclose those extra costs in the budget information he presented to the public before the budget was approved.)
Even though the records for these two requests concerned a matter of current city council discussion and the information was readily available to Smith to quickly and easily provide, he extended the time to respond to the FOIA request to June 5, which was maximum amount of time legally allowable by using an extension letter (that miscounted one of the response dates). I discussed Smith’s gamesmanship with this FOIA here, but the short version is that Smith did everything possible to delay providing records until June 24, well after the budget was approved. He also unlawfully padded the charges for providing the grant information in order to invoke the city’s FOIA policy that would allow him to further delay his response by using a deposit request.
How did he do it? Smith waited until June 4 to respond to the request, just before the extension of time expired. Instead of providing the records, Smith claimed he needed a 50% deposit from me before starting any work to retrieve the records (even though internal records show Smith had completed all the work to identify and locate the records before he sent the deposit letter). In his June 4 response, Smith padded the estimated costs to provide the records (for the response he’d already completed) by claiming, for example, that the clerk needed thirty minutes to reproduce 53 pages of records (or less) on a copier that copies at a rate of 150 pages per minute; treated the request for multiple grant applications that relied on a lot of duplicate information as separate requests so he could consider them as separate searches; failed to keep any time records; charged me for time Smith spent unsuccessfully searching a federal website because he negligently failed to keep a copy of one of the grant applications before pressing the submit button; and failed to provide a legally adequate final response to the request. The total “estimated” fee was $63. I paid the full amount to avoid further delay and asked for the backup for the fees Smith charged. After reviewing the backup and the records, I filed a fee appeal asking the city to refund the cost of Smith’s search time on a federal website that had nothing to do with searching his desk file for Clarkston records; asked that the time to search for the grant applications be properly calculated together rather than padded by treating them as separate requests; and I asked that the made-up copying charge be refunded.
I can assure you that any lawyer who understands the FOIA would look at what Smith did, see it for what it was, and direct him to fix it to avoid a lawsuit and a judicial order that he fix it and requiring the city to pay attorneys’ fees and costs – along with a potential fine for fee padding.
Let’s look at what Kolb charged the city to review this $63 FOIA fee from bills that were taken from the August 25, 2025, city council packet:
So, $270 in attorney fees over Smith’s unlawfully exaggerated $63 FOIA fee that he charged to retrieve records that should have been at his fingertips but was apparently charged only as an artifice to allow Smith to keep public information about employee benefit costs away from the public until he got what he wanted – council approval for the increased benefit costs – so he could primarily enrich Guillen, the city treasurer, and himself. In the end, the city refunded the entire $63 because, once the unlawful charges were removed, the remaining fees didn’t comport with the city’s policies on charging fees (which is probably why Smith padded the fees in the first place).
October 16, 2025, FOIA request:
I made a FOIA request for a complete copy of Smith’s purported text message exchange with Independence Township supervisor Chuck Phyle regarding city contract cancellations. Smith apparently screenshotted and shared a partially redacted text message about his exchange with Phyle, and it ended up posted on a Clarkston-related Facebook page. I also asked for related correspondence regarding the Independence Township contract cancellation issue from the date of the purported text message through the date of the FOIA request (less than a three-week period) along with the entire text message. Smith took a ten-day extension of time to respond until November 7. On November 5, Smith provided a handful of records and stated that it took less than fifteen minutes to locate them. (That’s important because state law prohibits charging a FOIA requestor for a record search that takes less than fifteen minutes.)
Let me say a word about extension letters. The city frequently sends them, they are entitled to send them, and the letters are simple to prepare. I had a draft form letter I provided to my internal clients in electronic form so they could handle this ministerial task for themselves. My form letter suggested that the clients use the date of the FOIA request plus a few words describing the request as the subject line, told them to note when and how the request was received (because emailed requests are treated differently than requests mailed by the postal service, for example), stated they were taking a ten business day extension of time, provided a brief reason why they needed the time (usually because they needed the time to search or redact), and gave a date when the response could be expected. Extension letters need to be sent within five business days from the receipt of a FOIA request and are so simple to put together that our clerks could handle them by filling in the blanks in my form letter and looking at a calendar to count time.
Asking an attorney to act as a secretary and prepare an extension letter is an extremely inappropriate thing to do because quite frankly, Kolb’s time is more valuable than Smith’s – yet that’s what Smith did in this case.
Here’s the October 22nd extension letter (that oddly refers to the city as a village even though we are legally a city):
And here’s Kolb’s bill for preparing the extension letter, taken from the November 24, 2025, city council packet:
The city paid $60 for this extension letter! I question Smith’s refusal to do it himself and I also question whether it took 24 minutes to prepare something that Kolb has likely prepared many times. In any event, Kolb would better serve the city by sending Smith a form letter to use in the future and letting him do his own secretarial work.
I received 22 pages of partially redacted records in response to this FOIA request that I’ve attached here. (I redacted Phyle’s phone number; the sloppy redactions on other pages were made by Clarkston.) You note the blue text on the first page contains the missing material from Smith’s text message string with Phyle that was published on Facebook. So now we know that before sharing the message, Smith removed an insulting swipe that he’d taken at residents who were voicing their concerns at city council meetings about excessive construction traffic. Smith admitted these records took less than 15 minutes to locate, yet there was a plethora of attorney fee charges submitted in the November 24, 2025, and January 12, 2026, city council packets:
So, $450 and almost three hours of attorney time spent to provide 22 pages of records (and city attorney Gerry Fisher didn’t submit a bill for the time he spent on this, so the attorney fees were even higher), not counting the $60 the city spent for Smith to delegate a simple extension letter to Kolb to prepare. While I wasn’t a party to these discussions, I can tell you from personal experience that attorneys don’t spend this much time talking about a simple FOIA request unless they’re trying to parse the language of the FOIA request in a way that allows the client to withhold records the client (or the attorneys) would really prefer to hide. But since Clarkston has a track record of being open and honest, I’m sure that’s totally not what happened here. 🙄
Rumor has it that the Independence Township contract issue is ongoing and was the basis for the secret February 17 and March 9 closed city council meetings. I refer to the meetings as “secret” because the city won’t even disclose the subject of the closed sessions to the public, yet the subject of a closed session (and the subject of the memo used to close the session) is not protected by the attorney/client privilege – because the subject itself doesn’t contain legal advice to a client. The bottom line is Kolb, Smith, and your city council just don’t want you to know what’s going on in your own city.
October 29, 2025, FOIA request:
This was a request for Nominating Petitions and Affidavit of Identity forms submitted by any Clarkston city council candidate interested in appearing on the November 4, 2025, ballot. I send one of these requests every year. These documents are always interesting, and you can learn a lot from who signs the petitions. (For example, you can often get an idea whether a candidate is truly independent or whether they’re just someone put up by Clarkston’s old guard because they think the council member will do their bidding.)
These documents should be readily available in the clerk’s files and no redactions are appropriate. The clerk responded on November 5 and admitted it took less than fifteen minutes to locate the records.
But there was a problem with the records – or more specifically, with this clerk. Guillen likes to remove information that she doesn’t want to provide about herself, even though there’s no legal basis for doing so and she doesn’t cite any statutory exemption that authorizes her to do it. This was the second time she’d unlawfully removed information in a response she provided to me. In this case, she covered up her notary signature before copying the record, even though state law (MCL 55.287) requires that a notary’s signature be legible.
On November 7, after reviewing the response, I told the clerk to provide me with a complete set of records that included her notary signature. On November 12, Guillen sent unredacted records, but not before she apparently engaged Kolb on the issue of hiding her notary signature from the public on an election document:
That’s right, folks. More bizarre behavior from our clerk trying to justify concealing her notary signature on election documents while performing her public function as a clerk and election official. Given that Guillen holds herself out as someone who understands the FOIA, this attorney contact was inexcusable and the $165 should have been deducted from her paycheck.
January 22, 2026, FOIA request:
I asked for records regarding clerk Guillen’s departure, return, and current status. I received the records I’ve published on this website – the email to council explaining that Guillen left with only two business days’ notice, the email describing Guillen showing up at city hall and begging for her job back, and Guillen’s July 14, 2025, oath of office.
The attorney charges for this response (taken from the March 9, 2026. city council packet), weren’t all that out of line, though I would note that the Kolb’s research regarding Guillen’s status as a public official was improperly lumped into the block billing charge regarding the FOIA request. This has the effect of making the overall charge for the FOIA consultation with Kolb appear larger than it should have been.
So, there you have it. I also have two pending FOIA requests at the moment – one asking for copies of the recently submitted grant submissions seeking state and federal dollars for street and sidewalk repair and the other for a copy of the current draft of Guillen’s employment agreement (that hopefully isn’t as glaringly deficient as the first draft I saw). Neither of these requests should result in search time greater than fifteen minutes or any redactions. It remains to be seen how much attorney billing Smith will incur to provide this basic material.
So, let’s not hear more complaints about attorney billings. If the city wants to take an aggressive take-no-prisoners approach to litigation, that will run up the fees. If city officials want to consult with a lawyer on simple record requests that don’t require legal advice (or wants to strategize with the lawyer on how to conceal or delay disclosure), that will run up the fees. Our hopes that appointment of an experienced and well-respected municipal lawyer as city attorney would usher in a time of more cooperative reasonable relations have not come to fruition. We are disappointed that Gerry Fisher appears to be the city attorney in name only and apparently knows nothing about the day-to-day work that Kolb does. In any event, the city council’s repeated moans about legal fees caused by its own personnel will not deter us from seeking a more honest and open city government