CINCINNATI — Attorney Tom Gabelman is not officially on the payroll, but if he were, he’d be one of Hamilton County’s most well-paid workers.
Since 2000, Hamilton County commissioners have paid more than $23 million to the two different law firms where Gabelman has worked – at an average annual expense of roughly $1 million.
More public money flowed to Gabelman’s current firm, Frost Brown Todd, annually in recent years than the county paid for the salaries of many top leaders, including the administrator, prosecutor and sheriff – combined.
Some county leaders say Gabelman’s expertise in riverfront development is well worth the expense. But others wonder how closely county officials are overseeing these legal bills, and if a private attorney is even necessary.
“$23 million is a lot of money,” said former Cincinnati mayor John Cranley.
Gabelman declined an interview, but in a statement to WCPO he said in part, “The benefit, value and return on investment to Hamilton County taxpayers of retaining special project counsel to sustain and advance Cincinnati’s riverfront development far exceeds the cost – by a factor of more than 20 times.”
During an interview with WCPO in 2019, Gabelman toured The Banks, pointing out the drastic improvements over the years. He helped develop Great American Ball Park, negotiate leases with the Cincinnati Bengals and General Electric, and bring life to The Banks.
“This was a mud pit. There was a gulf between the ballpark and the Freedom Center. There was nothing,” Gabelman said in 2019. “Right now it’s one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in the country.”
But Cranley questioned why the county is spending so much at Gabelman’s law firm to negotiate with the Cincinnati Bengals, when the city used its own staff attorneys to negotiate a stadium deal with FC Cincinnati in 2018.
“We didn’t pay millions of dollars to outside legal firms to negotiate that deal,” said Cranley, who left the mayor’s office in January due to term limits and is now an attorney at Keating, Muething & Klekamp.
Cranley also questioned how much the county paid to Gabelman’s firm in a 2019 interview, after the late Commissioner Todd Portune blamed the county’s high legal bill at the time, in part, to Cranley’s opposition to some terms of building a music venue at The Banks. Portune and Cranley later brokered a compromise to move forward with future development, but Cranley said the deal was never executed and is in limbo.
“I think that Joe Deters and the prosecutor’s office can and should do this (legal work) without millions of dollars in outside fees … the lawyers at the prosecutor’s office are smart and competent and we’re paying them, regardless,” Cranley said.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters declined an interview, but said his office is now reviewing years of invoices to the county from Gabelman’s firm.
“To the extent that there is a significant amount of legal work being performed by Mr. Gabelman that this office can do, we will continue to engage with the county as to the best use of public dollars,” Deters said in a statement.
Attorneys in Deters’ office do some work with Gabelman, particularly assistant prosecutor Roger Friedman.
“The consulting work related to The Banks project that Gabelman has been providing to the county is outside of the purview and operations of the prosecutor’s office and is not being done at the direction or control of the prosecutor’s office,” Deters said. “Although we are operating in separate capacities, the prosecutor’s office and Mr. Gabelman have worked collaboratively to provide the best advice to the board and the county administrator.”
Over the years, Deters has had a tumultuous relationship with Gabelman. Deters initiated legal action to end Gabelman’s contract in 2009, after his office’s budget was cut. The fight went all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, which sided with Deters. But Deters eventually relented, agreeing in 2010 to keep Gabelman as long as a budget cap was in place for his work.
The commissioners are ultimately in charge of how much the county spends on outside attorneys.
Commissioners voted in 2016 to cap the fees it pays to Gabelman’s firm at $575,000. But they agreed in five of the last six years to exceed that limit and pay even more in legal bills.
In 2019, Gabelman’s firm billed the county for more than $1.1 million. Of that total spend, $659,973 in bills arrived after WCPO reported on the issue on Oct. 1, 2019. Invoices for the months of July, August and September arrived at the county in mid-October and early November after the story aired, according to records obtained by WCPO through public records requests.
WCPO reached out to all three commissioners for an interview. Two of them — Denise Driehaus and Stephanie Summerow Dumas, issued statements in support of Gabelman. Commissioner Alicia Reece did not respond.
“When making decisions on billion-dollar development projects that are decades in the making, having someone with the right experience and the history in the room matters,” according to Dumas’ statement. “He’s worked with the private and public partners on The Banks for the past 25 years and his history and experience are invaluable.”
When WCPO first interviewed Driehaus about Gabelman’s legal bills in 2016, when she was running for a seat on the commission, she had this to say: “The other county offices are expected to live within a budget; I think the commission should also live within their budget.”
In Driehaus’ most recent statement to WCPO, she said in part, “No other attorney in the area has the same level of experience on that massive and complex project. With the upcoming lease renegotiation with the Bengals, and (stadium) renovations … to switch attorneys midstream would be a disservice to the taxpayers. However, I support the prosecutor and administrator in continually monitoring this arrangement to determine the right mix between inside and outside counsel.”
County administrator Jeff Aluotto also declined an interview. A county spokesperson provided written responses to some of WCPO’s questions about the legal bills.
“The county has prudently expended $23 million on legal and business consulting services and expenses over twenty-five years, which is .07% of the total public project cost of $1.9 billion,” according to a county spokesperson. “The Banks is a major economic driver that has a $1.7 billion annual economic impact to our region where thousands of people work, hundreds live, and families come from all over to visit and spend money.”
Gabelman’s firm charges the county $250 an hour, a rate that has not changed since 2006. This is far less than the $670 that Gabelman charges other clients per hour.
Attorney Josh Engel said this is, “a very reasonable rate for a lawyer in a large firm in Cincinnati.”
It isn’t unusual for municipal governments to hire private attorneys when specialized skills are required. For example, both the city and county hired outside attorneys to help with the ongoing Metropolitan Sewer District litigation.
“In the short term it is perfectly appropriate to bring in law firms that have specific sets of expertise or who have specific resources to deal with a project. When I worked for the government, we did that all the time," Engel said. “But that’s always a short-term thing … If this is a project that’s been going on for 20 plus years, I would expect at some point the county to say, well maybe we can hire someone who can do a lot of this stuff in house and that would be a lot more efficient.”
Engel is a former Warren County and Massachusetts prosecutor, and former chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Public Safety. He reviewed the invoices from Gabelman’s law firm, which WCPO received from the county through a public records request.
“My first reaction when I looked at the documents you were provided is that – these aren’t legal bills. This was a summary saying we charged X number of dollars, but it doesn’t include a breakdown of what that X number of dollars is for,” Engel said. “What you would like to see from the county is some evidence that they are actively supervising this matter, and actively supervising the fees that are being paid on this matter.”
A spokesperson said the county has detailed invoices of the work performed but did not supply them to WCPO because they are protected by attorney/client privilege and not public records.
"The monthly invoices submitted undergo several levels of review and approval within the county prior to payment," said spokesperson Bridget Doherty, who added that the county has paid all of Gabelman's invoices in their entirety.
In January the county budgeted $700,000 to spend with Gabelman’s law firm for the year. Now a county spokesperson anticipates that annual spend may reach $800,000 as “workload necessitates.”
In a 2019 interview, former Hamilton County Commissioner Chris Monzel believed Gabelman was the best attorney to represent the county on riverfront development, but he also said commissioners need to reign in his legal team’s bills.
“The county is really not going in there and putting limits on the spending and it does look like a blank check and it shouldn’t be,” said Monzel, who declined an interview for this story.
Engel wonders after two decades why the county hasn’t hired more staff lawyers to do what Gabelman’s firm does at potentially a huge savings.
“If after a number of years, you hire someone to come power wash your deck, at a certain point it just becomes cheaper to buy your own power washer,” Engel said.
There is a lot going on at The Banks this year to potentially drive up the cost of legal bills to the county, including construction of the Cincinnati Black Music Walk of Fame, and the county’s planned purchase of the remaining lots at Hilltop Basic Resources’ concrete plant for Bengals parking.
Also on the horizon: negotiations over expensive upgrades to Paycor Stadium and talks of new leases with the Bengals, and potentially with the Cincinnati Reds, which Cranley said should be negotiated at the same time.
“It would be one thing if we spent that money and we had another 30-year commitment from the teams to stay. But we don’t have that at all, and the clocks a tickin’,” Cranley said. “As a taxpayer, we’re paying millions of dollars to Tom Gabelman and yet every time I turn around there are more taxpayer concessions to the teams without any sense of getting a commitment that the Bengals and the Reds will stay here long term, which we all want.”
