CITY AWARDS CONTRACT TO FIRM OF TOXIC DUMPING DEFENDANT

Should we be surprised?

Tuesday evening the Grand Rapids City Commission, a.k.a. Boss Logie & the Supine Six, awarded the law firm Wardrop & Wardrop P.C. a City contract for legal services. The small three-man firm specializes in bankruptcy, immigration, and ambulance-chasing – ahem, that is, personal injury. Exactly why the taxpayers need the services of such a firm isn’t clear.

(L.A.W. will send a Freedom of Information Act request to the City to find out.)

What is clear is that one of the firm’s partners is Robert Wardrop, who is also a co-defendant of Boss Logie’s in the hazardous waste dumping lawsuit Tingley v 900 Monroe. One of the wrongful acts alleged in that lawsuit is that Wardrop struck a crooked deal with Logie and former City economic development chief Ned Zimmerman that, to make a VERY short story of it, ensured that the developers of the Berkey & Gay building would have a drive for transporting offsite the hazardous waste they were digging out of that property.

Wardrop had indiscreetly blabbed about this deal, and even went so far as to put the basic facts of it in an affidavit, as a way to stop the local court from prohibiting the developers from using that drive, which they desperately needed to get the hazardous waste out. Will Wardrop keep blabbing now that an attorney-client privilege – and a steady flow of taxpayer dollars - exist between the City and his firm?

Let’s answer that with the question that started this story. Should we be surprised that the City has decided that the taxpayers need an ambulance chaser on the payroll? Not if that ambulance chaser can implicate Boss Logie and the City in dumping hazardous waste in the middle of our fair city.