Mt. Pleasant Pays $300,000+ To Law Firm To Cover Four Months’ Work On Sleepy Hollow Voting Rights Case

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Mt. Pleasant Town Supervisor Carl Fulgenzi

July 10, 2024

By Barrett Seaman–

It was only last January when the Town of Mt. Pleasant announced that it had retained Baker Hostetler, a national law firm with a thousand lawyers in 17 offices–and expertise in the voting rights arena, to represent the Town in its effort to thwart an effort by five Hispanic voters in Sleepy Hollow to force a change in the Town’s method of voting.

At the Board’s July 9^th meeting, the board approved, without comment or dissent, a motion to pay Baker Hostetler $308,098.00 for legal fees just through March 31^st.

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When the complaint was first made a year ago, Mt. Pleasant had three options: it could accede to the request for a change and switch from an ‘at-large” system to a ward system or other tiered system such as “rank-choice” voting in which credit is given to second place candidates; it could enter into negotiations with the plaintiffs to seek a compromise, or it could fight it.

At a heated public hearing in November, many residents expressed resentment towards the Sleepy Hollow demand and urged the board to fight it—even though the law stipulates that if the town were to lose the case, it would have to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees as well as its own. A few who spoke cautioned that the likelihood of winning, based on cases brought elsewhere, was slim and that the cost of litigation could run in the millions. But the Board voted to fight. Supervisor Carl Fulgenzi is quoted in the New York Post as saying, “I do believe this is a back door effort by Democrats to eliminate the two-party system and wipe out the Republican Party in New York.”

The plaintiffs, represented by the White Plains law office of Abrams Fensterman, alleged that the Town’s “at-large” voting system discriminates against a protected group under the New York State’s year-old John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. It does so, they claimed, by diluting their voting power. Candidates for the Town Board supported by Sleepy Hollow, half of whose voting population is Hispanic, have never been able to overcome the overwhelmingly white (and largely conservative) vote in the rest of Mt. Pleasant. Their complaint noted that the Supervisor and all four of the Board members were White and Republican and that there had been “no candidate of color for the Town Board since 2003.” (see: https://thehudsonindependent.com/mt-pleasant-grapples-with-sleepy-hollow-voting-rights-charge/ and https://thehudsonindependent.com/mt-pleasant-hires-national-law-firm-to-fight-allegations-by-sleepy-hollow-hispanics-that-the-town-is-violating-the-voting-rights-act/

As reported in the Journal News/LoHud, the lead attorney on the case for Baker Hostetler charges $1,375-an-hour, while his principal associate on the case commands $875-an-hour. At a November 28 hearing, Supervisor Fulgenzi assured a questioner who voiced concern about the town’s financial exposure that the Town had a “fund balance” reserve of between $14 and $17 million, plus insurance, that could be tapped to limit taxpayer exposure.

This week’s decision to pay the $300,000-plus bill suggests that the Town’s insurance company is not going to subsidize the case. Moreover, this first invoice, which covers less that four months of Baker Hostetler’s representation, does not include subsequent work, including time-consuming witness depositions. Legal observers say the cumulative bill almost surely surpasses a million dollars already—not counting the legal expenses incurred by the plaintiffs—all of which would be added to Mt. Pleasant’s costs if the Town loses the case.

The track record for challenges to voting rights acts nationally is zero for three, with three cases, including Mt. Pleasant, pending in New York State. Moreover, Abrams Fensterman has now been joined by the Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic. The case is expected to go to trial in the fall.

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