OCEAN SPRINGS, MS – Sometimes what you see is not what you get — and nowhere is that truer than at an Ocean Springs Board of Aldermen meeting.
Last February, the Board seemed to take decisive action. In a multi-prong motion made by former Alderman Rickey Authement, the city committed to a new approach for its legal representation. Authement argued the city attorney should no longer defend lawsuits that might stem from an attorney’s own bad advice.
Instead, he said, all future litigation should be outsourced to attorneys specializing in the specific field at issue — whether land use, personal injury, or contract disputes. The logic was straightforward: remove any financial incentive for the city attorney to benefit from giving bad advice to city officials.
The Board voted unanimously to adopt this new rule. But when the official minutes were published and later approved, the wording was different. The safeguard against a city attorney defending his own bad advice — the very heart of Authement’s motion — vanished. By approving the minutes without correction, the Board locked in a sanitized version of the motion that stripped away its most important detail.
According to Mississippi law, what is said and voted on at a meeting doesn’t matter. All that matters is what is recorded as the official record in the approved minutes. It is up to the aldermen to ensure what is recorded on those minutes is an accurate depiction of what they voted on. In this case, the Board failed to do so.
The Harris Contract
Fast forward to this Tuesday, when the Board is set to vote on making interim city attorney David Harris permanent. His proposed contract explicitly states his firm will handle any litigation not covered by the city’s insurance — the exact arrangement Authement’s motion was designed to prevent.
Under the terms, Harris earns a $12,000 monthly retainer, plus $200 an hour to defend the city in uninsured lawsuits. In other words, if his legal advice lands the city in court, Harris’s firm profits again by defending it in court. The incentive Authement’s motion sought to eliminate is now written into the Harris contract.
Additionally, the proposed contract gives Harris the power to hire additional lawyers at $200 an hour, charging the city without seeking separate approval.
A Phantom Vote
This isn’t the first time in recent memory the official recording of votes has raised eyebrows — this time adding a vote that never took place.
In July, while serving as Interim City Attorney, David Harris included in the minutes an account of a supposed executive session “vote” that aldermen flatly denied ever happened. The disputed entry claimed the Board had unanimously agreed to allow former City Attorney Robert Wilkinson to continue representing the city in six outstanding lawsuits.
But this time the Board took notice.
In a tense public meeting, aldermen voted unanimously to strike the language, effectively declaring Harris wrongly recorded the actions of the closed door meeting.
Now, only weeks later, the same aldermen are prepared to hand him the keys to the city attorney’s office on a permanent basis.
The Broken Process
The city also ignored the process it voted on in February.
Authement’s motion — and the official minutes — required the city to issue Requests for Qualifications (RFQs) for an in-house attorney first. Only if that failed was the city supposed to move on to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for outside firms to take on the role as outsourced contractors.
Instead, the city skipped the RFQ step entirely. It issued only RFPs for law firms, but records prove the Board never discussed any of the applications that resulted from the advertisement. Ultimately, the Board installed Harris’s law firm as interim city attorney, without his firm ever having to apply for the position.
A public records request later revealed that no conflict-of-interest list or ethics check was conducted before his firm’s appointment.
The Larger Problem
What this episode shows is a deeper problem: in Ocean Springs, the official record doesn’t always match what residents saw and heard in real time. Videos of meetings tell one story; the minutes tell another. And once the minutes are approved, the written record prevails, no matter what was said or how the vote looked on tape.
That’s how a unanimous vote to prevent city attorneys from profiting off their own bad advice quietly morphed into a contract that does exactly that. And it’s how a lawyer recently accused by the Board of fabricating a vote could soon be rewarded with a permanent post.
What you see may not be what you get. And in Ocean Springs, the gap between record and reality is shaping who represents the city in court, and at what cost.
Authement’s actual motion and the unanimous vote can be seen here in its entirety on the city’s official YouTube channel. The official minutes – that do not coincide – can be seen here.
Someone should be responsibe to send out a draft of the previous minutes, as recorded, to the Board to proof as presented at the meeting and make any additions and/or corrections, if required. Time should be allowed for these additions and/or corrections to be transmitted to the Board so at the next meeting they can be approved as presented or approved with the noted additions and/or corrections. These follow the Roberts Rules of Order and should circumvent the issues the City is currently dealing with, as well as make the City more transparent.