- April 19, 2024
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Though the complaints filed against county officials were baseless, the Florida Commission on Ethics has voted unanimously not to grant Flagler County's request to recover the attorneys' fees it spent fighting them. County Attorney Al Hadeed is suggesting the county appeal that decision.
The complaints — one against Hadeed by John Ruffalo, and another against County Commissioner Nate McLaughlin by Dennis McDonald — are part of a string of filings against county officials to the Elections Commission and Ethics Commission which have repeatedly been dismissed.
The complaints have cost the county money. In a County Commission meeting Feb. 1, Hadeed urged County Commissioners to consider appealing the Ethics Commission's decision not to grant Flagler County attorney's fees from those cases. The appeal would be filed with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal.
The Ethics Commission's logic in its decision not to award attorneys' fees to the county is "counterintuitive," Hadeed said while explaining it to the Commission Commission.
"The chief counsel advised (the Ethics Commission) that they found the complaints against myself and Mr. McLaughlin, respectively, to be without merit because there were no ethics violations stated within the four corners of those very substantial submissions that they made up," he said. "So therefore, there was no material fact that was alleged related to an Ethics Commission violation, because there wasn’t one. So because there’s no material fact, they can’t be a false material fact. And therefore there can’t be an attorney fee. Are you following that logic?"
"Yeah, but it’s making my head spin," Commissioner Frank Meeker replied.
"I’m very sorry," Hadeed said. "As I said, it’s very counterintuitive. So, if on the other hand they had found that there was a sufficient allegation, and we went through a process and were vindicated, then we could seek the fees."
The Ethics Commission has "uniformly opposed" granting attorney's fees, Hadeed said. He suggested that part of the reason for the opposition was that working on attorneys fees requests would overload Ethics Commission staff. "It’s a huge workload issue, but nevertheless it’s part of the law," he said. "In my humble opinion, what they have done is create a new requirement that’s not in the statute."
The Ethics Commission reports did state other reasons for denying the county's request to recover attorney's fees: It had found that the county's petitions to recover fees had not sufficiently established that the complaints had been made "with a malicious intent to injure one's reputation," or that the complainants knew the allegations in the complaints were false, or had made them with "reckless disregard for the truth."
Therefore, according to an Ethics Commission staff memorandum, Flagler County's request does not meet the state's "very high bar for the recovery of fees."
The County Commission did not decide at the Feb. 1 meeting whether or not to file the appeal. It will make that decision after hearing a report Feb. 15 by Mark Herron, the Tallahassee attorney representing the county through the county's insurance company.
