Newport Beach looks for outside legal counsel

After spending “hundreds and hundreds” of hours on new regulations for group homes, the Newport Beach city attorney’s office is off the case, and a new outside legal firm will be hired.

Once a new firm is chosen by a council committee, the city also will discontinue the services of Los Angeles firm Goldfarb & Lipman LLP, which was hired specifically to handle the group home issue and already has earned more than $150,000 for legal advice to the city.

Mayor Steve Rosansky said disappointment with the counsel provided so far was not the reason for the change, which the City Council approved Tuesday.

“I’m not dissatisfied with the counsel that we’ve had from either the city attorney or Goldfarb & Lipman,” he said. “I think they’ve done an excellent job and come up with some creative ideas.”

How to regulate group homes — namely drug and alcohol recovery facilities — has been a controversial issue in Newport Beach for years that recently has become, thanks to the persistence of some residents, an all-consuming project.

Many group home occupants are considered disabled under the law and are therefore protected from housing discrimination, so city officials are walking a fine line between complaints that the homes hurt residential neighborhoods and the group homes’ right to exist.

A group of residents has doggedly pursued tougher regulations, hiring its own attorney, criticizing the city’s handling of the matter and accusing some city officials of conflicts of interest.

Residents have aimed some barbs at City Attorney Robin Clauson.

In an Aug. 22 e-mail, Bob Rush wrote that because Clauson didn’t point out a group home rule from Pasadena that might help Newport, her legal opinion “should be critically questioned as to accuracy and whose agenda it’s really serving.”

Clauson said she suggested a new outside firm as the sole counsel on group homes because she’s got plenty of other work to do, and it may decrease distractions if she’s not involved.

“Rightly or wrongly, she’s perceived herself as a little bit of a lightning rod here because of the allegations made by residents,” Rosansky said.

Residents also had questioned Goldfarb & Lipman’s loyalties, with Rush alleging the firm also had drug rehab homes as clients.

Clauson said the firm had no conflict of interest, but no one could shake residents’ perception of one.

With legal input also coming from attorneys for residents and group home operator Sober Living By the Sea, hiring a new firm looked like the best way to filter everything through one source.

“There are enough other issues and problems over this than to have residents be concerned over the outside legal counsel,” Clauson said. “It just wasn’t worth arguing over that point.”

Residents active on the issue believe the decision to hire new counsel was sound, Denys Oberman said.

“It’s actually going to eliminate confusion,” she said. “There’s clearly been an active unwillingness to cooperate ... on the part of the current city attorney.

“We believe that there are residual and potentially current conflicts that are causing that attitude, and so that’s just made this an unnecessarily long and frustrating process for the citizens, and for that matter, everyone concerned.”

The latest draft of new group home rules will go before the Planning Commission Thursday.

The City Council left it to the commission to decide whether to move ahead or wait for new legal counsel.