Repost: Rick Navarro Continues to Milk His Cash Cow, the City of Brownsville

From the editor:  Ricardo Navarro, a lawyer specializing in labor arbitration continues to rake in huge fees from the City of Brownsville working unwinnable arbitration cases involving city paramedics and firefighters.  Navarro is batting a bush league .092, losing 24 out of the last 26 cases.  Shed no tears for Navarro who gets paid whether he succeeds or fails.  Incredibly, dumbass city officials consult Navarro before pursuing arbitration.  The last two tiers of appeal before going to arbitration are Fire Chief Lenny Perez and City Manager Charlie Cabler.  Neither has a lick of common sense and foolishly choose time and again to waste taxpayer dollars fighting obviously unwinnable arbitration cases.  

Navarro's slickness is demonstrated in getting cases, not winning them.  In the Marco Longoria suspension case, Navarro was easily outlawyered by non-lawyer, ex-firefighter Louis Hebert, who outwitted Navarro at every turn.  

It's a beautiful scam, though.  The Texas Municipal League Intergovernmental Risk Pool(TML-IRP) sends the city commissioners to a training session that emphasizes holding down firefighter, police and paramedic labor costs.  The training emphasizes consulting labor attorneys at every juncture, setting the commission up to be played by lawyers like Navarro.  The training is subtly anti-union.  We do not know if the administrative group backs commissioners financially, but the "education" is obvious.  

Our inept city commission has squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees wasted on unwinnable fights, but there is a larger story.  The city is about to take a huge financial hit involving legal fees, interest and backpay in their total mishandling of the firefighter's contract.(That story will be coming soon.)

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

Rick Navarro Continues to Milk His Cash Cow, the City of Brownsville

Alan Ozuna, Lenny Perez, Ricardo Navarro

Rick Navarro, the attorney who routinely represents the City of Brownsville against fire fighters and police officers in arbitration cases gets paid for litigation, not victories.

"That's fair," an observer might say.  "Doctors get paid regardless of whether the surgery is successful.    Navarro can't control the results and he should get paid for his time."

"OK.  That's a fair analogy," someone else might counter, "but what if the doctor is performing unnecessary surgeries just to rake in the bucks?  Isn't that unethical?"

Actually, this is exactly what's happening.  While the city has a its own legal team of three, earning over a quarter of a million dollars annually, Navarro's firm is said to have likely been paid several million dollars in legal fees in the decade or so of losing arbitration cases for the city.

Mean Mister Brownsville isolated several factors contributing to the enrichment of the Navarro-Ozuna labor law team in a September 13, 2011 article and a December 4, 2011 followup article.  Here is a quote from the second article:  "One firefighter put it this way: "Lenny is a total pendejo with a Napoleonic complex. He has total distrust of staff that have skills and abilities exceeding his own." Fire Chief Perez and City Manager Charlie Cabler are known for stonewalling grievances that could be easily settled by skilled administrators."  What we were saying back then is that Lenny Perez's soured relationship with his men led him to vindictively allow situations to go to arbitration that could have easily been settled by reasonable men.  Since City Manager Charlie Cabler was the last option to resolve a matter before arbitration, his poor management skills contributed to the problem, inflating Navarro's legal fees.

Thus Navarro benefits financially from an adversarial relationship between the fire chief and his men, but also the acquiescence of Charlie Cabler in allowing even obvious, clear-cut situations to go to arbitration.  Navarro, of course, laughs all the way to the bank.

Just today(9/24/2012) I received a call from a union member advising me of a hearing to consider new rules for arbitration cases.  "Jim, Navarro is pushing for new rules that will send almost all matters into arbitration.  And who do you think will represent the city in those cases?  If this goes through, the city will be wasting even more money.  Of course, this is "good for business" for Navarro.  He is just playing our stupid fire chief.  We went to a meeting the other day with the fire chief and our new police chief.  Police Chief Orlando Rodriguez said he didn't need new rules.  Everything is working fine.  Perez, though is so stupid.  He is brainwashed by Navarro."

So, in a time of tight budgets, threats of tax increases, mismanagement by city officials continues to squander tax dollars for unnecessary arbitration cases with one primary beneficiary:   Ricardo Navarro.