The monitor overseeing the Cleveland police consent decree says the city is behind on its bills. The dispute over payments reemerged this week after lying dormant since earlier this year when a federal judge had to intervene in the conflict over what the city should pay for, how bills should be formatted and what is causing the delays.
During a city council meeting Wednesday, Monitor Karl Racine told city council members Cleveland currently owes the monitoring team $286,000.
Racine’s employer, the Washington, D.C. law firm Hogan Lovells, is paying staff salaries while it waits for the city, he told council.
“That is not going to be able to go on much longer, and I’m serious about that,” said Racine.
He added that he met with Mayor Justin Bibb who assured him the problem would be corrected.
City spokesperson Tyler Sinclair countered that Bibb told Racine the city’s “Law and Finance Departments would look over their invoices again and follow up regarding any questions or concerns they had.”
“This due diligence process is similar to how the City handles other bills it receives. As stewards of taxpayer dollars it is imperative that we review our bills with a careful eye to ensure we're not being billed for expenses that we should not have to pay,” Sinclair said. “How the Monitoring Team misconstrued that as a commitment to pay invoices that aren't approved by the court is beyond me.”
The federal judge who has authority over the consent decree, Judge Solomon Oliver, appointed Racine and the other members of his monitoring team on April 12, 2023 to serve as the third monitor since 2015.
Several members of the monitoring team, including Racine, bill the city $750 an hour for their time and then discount the total bill by 20%. The local members of the team who were employed by the previous monitor bill the city at $250 an hour.
Taxpayers spent between $6 and $11 million dollars annually to watch over police from 2015 to 2022. The Division of Police’s overall budget in 2022 was about $223 million.
Under the terms of the 2015 agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the city of Cleveland, the city is required to pay all the monitor’s bills. Payment is made through the court, and the online docket keeps a record of each payment made since the consent decree began.
Based on those docket entries, it appears that billing delays started shortly after Racine came on the job. Payments to the previous monitor, Hassan Aden, were made pretty consistently three months after the period being billed for — the November 2022 bill was paid in February. The December 2022 bill was paid in March.
A significant time delay began to occur with the payment of Racine’s June, July and August 2023 bills, which were not paid until February 2024.
In March of 2024, the city and the monitor debated the delayed payments with Judge Oliver during a court hearing and in subsequent filings.
On March 18, 2024, the city filed a “Status Conference Statement” arguing that “Invoices are submitted weeks, or even months, after the activities at issue… Mathematical errors and obvious mistakes have been noted, along with more substantive issues. Cleveland’s audits usually result in revisions to the invoices. For instance, in the April/ May invoice, Hogan Lovells agreed to remove hours that were spent working with the parties on its acknowledgment letter.”
The city also argued that the monitor’s invoices lack detail and leave open the possibility that the monitoring team is billing the city twice for the same activity. The city, in emails to the monitoring team, also criticized the formatting of invoices.
“As with the September and October invoices, the Description column did not line up evenly with the Date and Name columns, making for difficult reading,” wrote Cleveland Law Director Mark Griffin in one email to the monitor.
In another email, sent on August 22, 2023, Griffin appeared to question the credentials and necessity of one team member’s activities in Cleveland, including time spent observing a police department Force Review Board meeting.
“As with the April 28, 2023, bill by Abby Jae Wilhelm for 6.00 hours for 'Monitor Force Review Board,' the issue would be whether the City should pay either the expenses or the hourly rate of a MT member for pure observation time,” wrote Griffin. “It was noted that Abby Jae Wilhem is a ‘policy advisor’ for Hogan Lovells. Her firm biography notes she was previously chief of staff at the D.C. AG’s office, ‘where she was a thought partner and strategic advisor to then-Attorney General, Karl Racine.’”
In that email, the city also disputed four hours billed by Racine to the city for attending a city council hearing. Griffin wrote that a review of the meeting video on YouTube showed that Racine’s testimony “may have been closer to 2.0 hours.”
“The biller may have intended that his preparation time and follow-up conversations be included in the compensable time, but the lack of detail gives the appearance of possible overbilling,” Griffin wrote.
The court docket indicates the parties resolved their differences over Wilhelm’s billable hours and the column alignment, but does not say how.
The U.S. Department of Justice dismissed the criticism of Wilhelm’s time spent at the Force Review Board meeting, saying that observing those meetings is part of determining whether the city is in compliance with the consent decree.
“The City Law Department will often repeat the same objections over and over again across each new invoice, agree to withdraw its objection, and then re-raise an identical objection on a subsequent invoice only to withdraw it again after further argument,” Racine wrote in March.
According to the docket, all the issues appeared to have been resolved between the parties earlier this year except one that required the judge’s intervention: billing the city for a staff member who assists with the preparation of invoices. The city deemed that practice (which Racine asserts the city had paid for every month during the previous eight years of the consent decree) “billing for billing.” Judge Solomon Oliver ultimately split the cost between the two parties, with two-thirds of the cost going to the city and the rest going to the monitor.
That decision was made on March 26, 2024. But resolution was apparently elusive.
“We try not to go crying to the court, nor to the council, nor to the mayor when the city is putting in games around disputes around our bills,” Racine told council Wednesday.
According to the court docket, the city has not paid the monitor since August, when it was ordered to pay the monitor’s monthly invoice for February 2024.
