BELLEAIR BEACH -- The Clearwater Gazette & Beach Views, the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Belleair Beach, has accepted two offers of settlement from two of the three defendants in the action.
Jim Yacavone, the lawyer for Angela Eisenberg, a city employee, opened the offers of settlement flood gates with his offer to Bob Walker, lawyer for the Gazette.
Once his offer was received, Tom McGowan, who is attempting to defend Mayor Mike Kelly, Belleair Beach's mayor, and Kelly's high paid assistant, Tina Skaggs, sent offers of settlement to Walker.
The Gazette accepted the Eisenberg offer and an offer pertaining to Kelly and the count in the lawsuit that referred to public records violations.
Now a year old, the suit was triggered by copies of the newspaper being thrown away at city hall and thereby being blocked from distribution to the public.
The Gazette is seeking no monetary damages in the action from the city, the mayor or any of its employees.
Walker said, "there are no monetary damages because the paper is free to the intended recipients and the case is about acknowledging the wrong and preventing it from happening again."
Even without monetary damages, the city faces considerable expense in the lawsuit.
Besides paying two lawyers -- McGowan has been on the case for about a year and Yacavone was hired recently to defend Eisenberg -- if the city loses the lawsuit under the provisions of the law it will have to pay costs and fees of the plaintiff.
So far, it is unclear what McGowan has charged the city for his services. Walker said, "My estimate based upon a quick summary is that some $65,000 has been billed over the course of the last year, much of it occasioned by the tactics of the defendants in filing multiple motions to dismiss, opposing discovery, resulting in a number of hearings that have gone substantially in favor of the Gazette."
Essentially, as far as the gravamen of the case against her is concerned, Eisenberg agreed to allow the court to enjoin her from discriminating or retaliating against the Gazette and requiring her to distribute and dispose of the newspaper distributed by the Gazette in the same fashion and manner as any other public newspaper allowed to be distributed in the City Hall of the City of Belleair Beach.
The Yacavone proposal for settlement was apparently based on his estimate that such a move made sense. He came to the case recently, reviewed the file that accumulated for almost a year including depositions and apparently decided that the most expeditious and fair thing to do was to get his client out of the lawsuit.
McGowan, by contrast, has gone on for a year in a case, as one Belleair Beach resident pointed out in public recently, that could have been settled with an apology.
Two days after the Yacavone proposal on Eisenberg's behalf was received, Walker got proposals of settlement from McGowan on behalf of Kelly and Skaggs.
The proposals were identical and included a included a monetary amount of $500 in settlement of costs and fees. In addition, there was an offer of settlement from Kelly on the public records count.
The Gazette rejected the idea of the $500 offer in all cases, but did accept Kelly's offer on the public records.
Chuck Pollick, publisher of the Clearwater Gazette & Beach Views, said, "My intent in this case was to stop their acts harming the newspaper and public. They could have avoided all of this by being reasonable from the get-go. They were not."
Rudy Davis, a city resident, said in mid-August, addressing the City Council, "The city is wrong to pursue this case."
In his remarks, Davis also said, "We should have apologized and not spent one dime of the taxpayers' money to defend someone's ego. Now we have already spent thousands of dollars and it hasn't even gone to court."
Should the case continue on the remaining matters, Walker has several more witnesses scheduled for deposing whose testimony could weigh heavily against the city.