The Cottonwood City Council formally accepted the resignation of City Attorney Jenny Winkler during its Dec. 19 meeting.
In a Dec. 15 email, Winkler informed the mayor and council members, “This is to notify you that I am resigning my position with the city of Cottonwood effective March 15, 2024.” Winkler gave the required 90-day notice specified in her contract.
“Professionally, I’m not going to leave you high and dry,” Winkler said. “I will do what is necessary to transition the work to outside counsel and ensure that staff’s needs are met and council’s needs are met.”
“I have to apologize for this council for what happened to you,” Vice Mayor Debbie Wilden said to Winkler.
“It has been a pleasure working with you,” Elinski said. “We certainly could have done a lot of great things with your expertise in water law. I’m truly sorry to see you go and a bit jealous of another northern Arizona community that’s likely to snatch you up to where you can put your legal prowess to good use. Thank you for what you’ve done here.”
Both Councilwoman Helaine Kurot and Wilden voted against accepting Winkler’s resignation with the rest of the council in favor.
Council Rejects Legal Advisor
The council also discussed hiring Timothy A. La Sota, PLC, as a legal advisor to the council. The agenda item was cosponsored by Councilwoman Lisa DuVernay and Councilman Derek Palosaari, who was calling in remotely and left the meeting before the agenda item.
“With the last year being as tumultuous as it has been, I feel it would be in the council’s best interest to hire an outside attorney,” DuVernay said. “I believe that we have been in a rut for the last 12 months. As a council, I believe we need more guidance now than ever. I think we need legal guidance which I don’t feel like we have, like I have.”
Kurot said that the council doesn’t know anything about this particular attorney and that the council as a whole should select the city attorney.
“I don’t see how bringing in a second attorney is helping anything,” Kurot said. ‘I think that will just make the whole situation worse. If there are issues that need to be addressed with how things have been handled, that’s a whole separate conversation. The way this was brought up isn’t helping anything at this point.”
Specializing in elections law, La Sota represented failed Arizona gubernatorial Republican candidate Kari Lake in her unsuccessful attempts to overturn the 2022 election and in a defamation suit against her filed by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. Lake has since hired other lawyers.
La Sota also represented former Republican candidate Abe Hamadeh in his failed attempts to challenge his 2022 loss to Arizona Attorney General candidate Kris Mayes; the Cochise County Board of Supervisors in 2022 when the Republican majority attempted to transfer statutory duties regarding certifying elections to a partisan county recorder; and Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers [R-District 7] in 2019 when she was facing a senate ethics investigation over a racist post on Twitter. Rogers was later censured by the senate in 2022 for “conduct unbecoming of a senator, including publicly issuing and promoting social media and video messages encouraging violence.”
Mayor Tim Elinski said that the council hires its attorney and that there’s a process they go through to do so.
“It’s unusual to hand-pick an attorney that you’d like to work with but not do a process that’s open to the public, vets out the candidates and defines what the goal is,” Elinski said. “We know what the goal is with our city attorney, to represent all of council and the city as an entity … To hand-pick an attorney leaves the public out of the process and I don’t think it’s right that we should spend the public’s money on an attorney that you have hand-picked without there being a request for qualifications.”
Elinski added that an engagement letter was requested, but the council has not yet been able to vet La Sota’s qualifications or even discuss why an additional attorney would be needed.
“It seems like we’re not following a process that’s very transparent,” Elinski said.
Wilden said that she was concerned that two council members solicited this attorney without the rest of council’s knowledge.
Newly sworn-in Councilman Michael Mathews said that this isn’t intended to be a permanent city position but a legal advisor that will represent council.
“We’ve got questions right now and they can’t be answered without good, competent legal counsel,” Mathews said. “I believe we do need legal representation from somewhere.”
Elinski suggested the two council members who sponsored the item come back with an explanation of what they’re trying to accomplish with the position so council could discuss it at a later work session.
Kurot said that it wouldn’t be productive to have a second attorney on retainer to argue with the city attorney, which would create a back-and-forth, and added that doing so would also not help the city hire a permanent city attorney because candidates would not want to deal with that situation.
Wilden pointed out that the council still has outside legal counsel retained with Pierce Coleman, a firm they’ve worked with for a couple of years as the outside city attorney.
Council took no action to continue the discussion of hiring La Sota.
