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IRVINE: Okay. WURDEMAN: Not as many questions as I thought. YUEN: I have a question. RAY: Mr. Yuen. YUEN: I'm trying to figure out how to do this without, and where the money is coming from, if the Council doesn't authorize it. Is there some general contingency fund that would be available? The money has to be appropriated for some purpose. I'm wondering if the section could be reworded so that the Council could make an appropriation with the budget for the hiring of attorneys in a conflict of interest situation without a specific matter being presented to it so that that could be then drawn on by Corp Counsel when they felt that they were required to provide an attorney? I think, as is presently worded, you have to go to Council with every specific request and then you get tied up into the facts of a particular case where they may be unsavory to the Council to appropriate the money for this particular employee and I think that is the way it works now. I'm wondering if we found a way to reword this so that in situations like you discussed, the Corp Counsel could go, as part of their regular budget request, to the Council and have a lump sum that would be available for hiring attorneys in conflict • of interest situations, if that would alleviate the problem enough? Otherwise, then you'd have to find some other fund from which this is drawn even if you give Corp Counsel the power to hire "special counsel" in these kinds of situations. WURDEMAN: Right. Well, presently we have a line item in every budget for "special counsel" and there is a lump sum there. So we go to Council once a year, at budget time, and we argue for that and they hardly ever raise it. They lower it and we dicker about that and the budget is passed with that lump sum in there. Then as an individual case arises, we go back. To make it even worse, in some cases we'll go back and they'll say well, you're authorized to hire "special counsel" up to $15,000 or something. And then we say okay. So we retain someone and we write into the contract that there's a cap of $15,000 which always turns out to be inadequate and we have to go back to the Council again and by this time, the case is half way completed and it's really impractical. I mean, you've got a lawyer who's involved in the case and $15,000 has been expended, trial's next week, we're out of money. I mean what are you going to do? You can't change horses at that point so it's not a very good system. BESS: Mr. Chairman. RAY: Wait. That's not quite the way it works. I was on the County Council and been involved in a number of these and it seems that the Corporation Counsel frequently uses the County Council as sort of a leverage or bargaining tool