A Conversation With ... Dan Wichmer

What are the duties of the city attorney’s office?
The duties of the city attorney are to provide legal advice to all city departments, city council and all citizen boards. You add all that up, and it’s a lot.

We have roughly 22 different departments, citizen boards, citizen task forces, planning and zoning, any litigation involving the city and criminal prosecution to handle. Anything that involves a legal activity, we are part of.

We draft all council bills and contracts the city does. In any given year, that’s 600, 700 contracts and 200, 300 ordinances. We process roughly, depending on the year, 28,000 to 50,000 tickets.

The misconception is people think I work for the citizens and that is not true. I cannot provide advice, because I am required to provide advice to City Council. They are my client. Citizens say to me, “Hey, I pay your salary, answer my question,” and I say, “Thank you, but I don’t represent you, I represent City Council.”

What it comes down to is we have a full-service law firm within the city.

How much of that workload do you handle?
I have 15 attorneys. I have four full-time criminal [attorneys], a full-time airport and a full-time parks because they are very busy. Then you have various departments that require at least one attorney, such as Public Works.

My job personally, is to advise City Council, the city manager and citizen boards. The Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights, the Police Fire Pension Taskforce – pick a task force or pick a board that has been appointed to study an issue and either I or one of my attorneys advises them. At one point we had 35 boards floating around. We make sure they comply with Sunshine Law, make sure they understand their laws and their ethical duties.

You have served as city attorney for Springfield since 2005. What are the biggest issues you’ve had to deal with?
(Sexual orientation, gender identity), marijuana, E-Verify, the development of College Station, the Heer’s project – there are so many projects that have come and gone in my brain. That’s one of the things I enjoy about the job, you always have something interesting that is being presented to you. You can point to various parts of the city and say, “I helped work with that.”

E-Verify was a little different because you have a dynamic going on at the local level where national interest groups are targeting cities. They come in and have a good pitch. People operate in sound bites more than they used to. A very complicated issue like immigration was reduced to, “We want to keep illegals from taking your jobs.”

Sometimes citizens and council don’t understand that you’re asking us for a definite opinion on something that at best we might have a 50/50 answer on.

One of the things that council and city mangers I’ve worked  with understand is that at some point the answer might be a no, but is it an absolute no or are there other alternatives? Sometimes we are more successful then others at offering alternatives and sometimes the answer is just no.

As city attorney in Branson, what challenges did you face when tackling the Branson Landing project?
The first challenge was how to accumulate sufficient land along the lakefront. Then deal with the fact that you have 100 years of property ownership issues. In Branson, on the lakefront, you have three entities. There is state (Department of Natural Resources)because of Taneycomo, you have the federal Energy Regulatory Commission because Table Rock is an energy generating dam and then local politics. You have a town of 7,000 at the time and you’re pitching an idea of spending $180 million on the public side for this project. It wasn’t an easy sell.

I helped lay most of the groundwork but was gone before the buildings were actually out of the ground. The bulk of what I did was get things into place so the building could start.

We had 59 public meetings about whether to do the project at all. I remember my first meeting there. It started at roughly 6 p.m. and the hearing ended at 3 a.m.[[In-content Ad]]