Sarpy County's $678,000 man

Sarpy County Board members signed an open-ended contract when they selected attorney Kermit Brashear to be their $350-an-hour pitchman to bring the minor league Omaha Royals to the suburbs.

Brashear's law firm has racked up major league compensation, with a tab, as of last week, of $678,000.

The County Board had a less-expensive option last November, when former Omaha Mayor P.J. Morgan offered to put his firm to work on the project for a flat fee of $150 an hour.

Now, several Sarpy County elected officials and community leaders are complaining about what they say are hefty fees paid to Brashear.

But Brashear, a former speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, and others say the fees have been justified. Just look at the scoreboard, they said: a 25-year contract with the Royals in hand, a site in western Sarpy County for the new minor league stadium, and a workable financing plan to build the $26 million, 6,000-seat stadium.

Brashear said in an interview last week that the work of his firm, Brashear LLP, is not finished yet.

“We are still very much involved in putting together the intricacies of the agreement between the Royals, the City of Papillion, the developer, all of that,” he said.

Others question why the county gave Brashear an open-ended contract, particularly because Morgan's real estate company offered a capable, far-less-expensive alternative.

“I am very curious how the County Board entered into a contract like that to allow those kinds of payments,” said State Sen. Abbie Cornett of Bellevue. “That's an obscene amount of money.”

At the time of the contract, Brashear told county officials that his firm's fees could reach $500,000 for the amount of time needed to tackle the project.

In the interview, Brashear noted the time crunch that Sarpy faced to complete a deal with the Royals before the team looked elsewhere.

In addition, Brashear and his law partners negotiated a long-term stadium lease agreement with the Royals. They conducted an extensive site selection process. They studied various public and private financing alternatives.

They met with numerous government officials and developers and drafted legislation that ultimately failed to pass in the Nebraska Legislature this spring.

“We have led the stadium project with the Omaha Royals and managed it,” Brashear said. “We are the point people who put it all together. We started only with an idea, and nothing else.

“Now you've got a payment by the Royals in writing. You don't get there by nothing.”

Brashear said his firm so far has discounted its legal services to Sarpy County by more than $75,000, or 11 percent.

Brashear, who bills at $350 an hour, and three partners account for about 95 percent of Sarpy County's legal bills on the ballpark project. The partners are James Pieper, who bills at $250 an hour; David M. Hohman, who bills at $230 an hour; and Brashear's son Tre Brashear, who bills at $230 an hour.

Kermit Brashear's fees do not include payments to architecture and engineering firms, said Sarpy County Administrator Mark Wayne.

In late June, the county paid $71,380 to the DLR Group and Olsson Associates for pre-design and site selection work handled by both firms.

Newly elected County Board member Tom Richards of Bellevue said that he and other board members have not questioned or balked at making payments to Brashear LLP even as the tab grows. Only two of the current five members, Joni Jones and Rich Jansen, were in office last November when the county approved Brashear's stadium consultant contract.

The contract states that Sarpy County can terminate its agreement with Brashear at any time, but there have been no discussions about doing so, several board members said.

“There was an agreement in 2008, and it hasn't been modified since that time,” said Richards. He was the only board member to vote against the deal with the Royals, saying he didn't have enough information on how the county would finance the stadium project.

“Kermit was basically hired to put together a deal,” Richards said. “I don't think there's any billing discrepancies. He's charging the county for what he's doing, as per the agreement. From what I've seen so far, he's used most of the resources of his office to do that.”

Jones, the board's chairwoman, cited Brashear's involvement in commercial development at Omaha's Aksarben Village and the Qwest Center Omaha, plus his experience in the Nebraska Legislature, as the chief reasons she voted for his firm over Morgan's.

“Even though Kermit's fees were higher, we just felt that he more or less had the total package,” Jones said. “We needed Kermit's expertise in putting a deal together.

“I think P.J.'s expertise is working with land deals,” Jones said. “After working with the Brashear law firm, I don't know if the expertise would have been there with P.J.'s firm.

“I think we made the right choice. Yeah, we didn't get any (stadium) legislation passed in Lincoln, but that was politics at its best.”

Others in Sarpy County wonder whether the board squandered money.

Veteran Bellevue City Councilman David Sanborn said the county should have included provisions in Brashear's contract capping his fees at a fixed rate or negotiated a lower hourly fee than the rates Brashear suggested.

“It would seem that was too loose of a contract,” Sanborn said. “It would be hard to say that P.J. wasn't qualified. I think that comparing the hourly fees, it would seem to me they were both equally experienced. At least P.J. is a former mayor of Omaha.”

Morgan said he and his business partner, Walt Peffer, routinely charge a combined $300 to $400 per hour for their professional services on significant land development projects. However, unlike Brashear and his partners, neither he nor Peffer is a lawyer.

But Morgan is no slouch. As Omaha's mayor, he negotiated the first multiyear contract with the NCAA for the College World Series. He worked out a contract extension between the City of Omaha and the Omaha Royals to stay at Rosenblatt Stadium. He helped a former Omaha Royals owner sell the team with the provision that the club remain in the Omaha metropolitan area.

“The fees we suggested to Sarpy County were minimal,” Morgan said. “We are normally paid much more than that.

“We don't want to be critical of Kermit. We respect what he has proposed and what he has done. But our incentive was more with respect to a community service to keep the Royals in the metro area.”

Sarpy County officials plan to change Brashear's role as the ballpark project moves closer to construction, west of Papillion near Nebraska Highway 370 and 126th Street.

“We have told Kermit that we are not going to continue to pay these fees to get into the construction, and he has agreed that it won't be the same,” Jones said. “What that reduced fee will be, we still don't know yet.”

The Royals want to move into the ballpark for the 2011 season.

Cornett, the state senator from Bellevue, predicted that Brashear's taxpayer-funded legal bills could hurt Sarpy County's chances of getting stadium-related legislation passed.

In May, Cornett declined to try to advance her bill to aid the Sarpy County stadium project. However, Sarpy County lawmakers are expected to revive efforts when the Legislature convenes in January.

“I am all for the stadium, truthfully. I do think it's good for the county,” Cornett said. “If we are doing legislation to help Sarpy County's economic development, that's fine.

“But if we are helping pay off legal fees for that, or to pay for the DLR Group, then I do not sense there would be any strong support at the Legislature.”

Contact the writer:

444-1056, john.ferak@owh.com