What price legal advice?
Amherst officials spend about $160,000 a year on legal advice, and as they ponder ways to cut their budgets, reducing payments to lawyers don’t figure to be an option. In addition to routine questions town officials ask the attorneys at Kopelman and Page (which calls itself “the leader in municipal law”), they need defenders when citizens who feel aggrieved by their decisions file lawsuits. Many of the most expensive suits have been over permits for development. “There’s a conflict between people who are applying for applications to improve property and neighbors who are challenging the appropriateness of that development,” said Town Manager Larry Shaffer. The $160,000 figure is the annual average of the amount Amherst has spent on lawyers from fiscal 2006 through 2008. For those first two years, the Amherst legal payments were 11 percent higher than in Northampton. The city to the west had much higher legal expenses than Amherst in fiscal 2008 because of contract negotiations, said Fi
