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The City of Storm Lake wants Buena Vista County to cover its legal bill — more than $16,000 — for winning a discovery fight in the broader case over $5 million in tax-increment financing revenue the county mistakenly sent to taxing entities that had no claim to it.
The county’s lawyers responded that the $16,427 tab the city is seeking is unreasonable for county taxpayers to bear — city taxpayers already paid it.
Katie Graham, a Des Moines attorney representing the county, claimed that the city’s lawyers were charging unreasonable rates for duplicative work. She wrote to Judge Shayne Mayer that two senior partners at the city’s law firm, Dorsey & Whitney of Des Moines, staffed a single discovery motion with no work delegated to an associate or paralegal. She claimed nearly every entry for which the city is seeking compensation for one partner’s time includes communications with the other.
For those entries, the city would be paying its two attorneys $1,400 per hour.
“In total, the city asks the court to shift $16,427 in public funds for a single discovery motion,” reads a seven-page motion the county’s lawyers filed in Emmet County District Court last Thursday. “If any award is made, it should be limited to hours actually documented, at Iowa market rates, for work that produced the ruling alone.”
The partners, Bill Miller and Angela Dralle, charged the city $730 per hour and $660 per hour, respectively. The county’s lawyers charge rates ranging between $250 per hour to $370 per hour. Graham noted that Miller graduated law school a year after one of her partners, Ben Roach.
“The fees requested by council for the city are not reasonable based on market rates in Emmet County, or any county in Iowa,” the filing reads.
Dana Larsen, a spokesman for the City of Storm Lake, didn’t respond to a request for comment before presstime on the county’s claims. The city’s attorneys haven’t yet responded to the county’s claims in court.
In his initial ask for the $16,427, Miller wrote to Judge Mayer that the bills reflected only the attorney work that entailed compelling the county to produce the computer data, or audit logs. He noted that the tab didn’t reflect time spent conferring with the county about voluntarily producing the audit logs.
“The above-stated costs reflect only those incurred from March 3, 2026 — the point at which it became clear a motion to compel was necessary — through the argument on Storm Lake’s motion,” reads an affidavit Miller submitted last Monday.
The dispute will result in a hearing in front of Judge Shayne Mayer to address whether the county should be on the hook for the entire amount. To date, both law firms have charged a combined $908,000 to the taxpayers through two and a half years of litigation. The city’s lawyers have racked up $572,000; the county’s charged $335,000. A five-day jury trial is set for next June at the Emmet County Courthouse in Estherville.
The fee conflict began when the city won a discovery request against the county.
The city argued it needed the county’s audit logs to build its case that the county is liable for erroneously distributing over $5 million of the city’s tax-increment financing revenue over 12 years. It started last October, when Deputy Auditor Karla Ahrendsen testified in a deposition that the county had access to records showing changes to frozen base values in the city’s tax-increment financing districts.
Tyler Technologies, the Des Moines company that maintains the county's tax-increment financing software, later testified that a frozen, district-level base value had been "manually changed" by the county in December 2016. Under tax-increment financing, a frozen base value isn't supposed to change. That kind of change was one of several red flags the city's former finance manager, Brian Oakleaf, explained to the city council in November 2022 — red flags that led to the conclusion the county had shorted the city more than $5 million in TIF revenue over 12 years.
The county resisted the city's push to produce the audit logs. Its lawyers said doing so would require creating new documents, altering the software's security settings, and pulling in extended assistance from Tyler — and that the process could even freeze the county auditor's computers.
Those arguments, Graham wrote to Judge Mayer, show the county’s stance was “substantially justified,” meaning the county shouldn’t have to pay the city’s attorney fees under state civil court rules. She also claimed the city’s attorneys never requested attorney fees in the first place.
The second prong of Graham's argument: the city's $16,000 tab isn't reasonable and should be reduced or denied outright. One standard for reasonableness is "prevailing market rates in the relevant community" — and she pointed to a case decided two years ago, in which a judge found that reasonable fees for attorneys specializing in renewable energy development ran $320 to $515 per hour.
Graham also said the city's billing records didn't adequately show the $16,427 in charges were tied to the discovery dispute, pointing to one redacted entry — $4,356 for 6.6 hours — with no breakdown of individual tasks.
And she took issue with the city redacting its invoices.
“The city redacted its invoices for ‘relevance and to preserve privilege,’” Graham’s filing reads. “The city cannot carry its burden with records it has made unreviewable when the narratives it seeks to recover on are block-billed.”
City redacts invoices; BV County doesn’t
A review of invoices Dorsey & Whitney submitted to the city between June 2023 and August 2024 shows more instances consistent with what the county’s lawyers are alleging.
Six attorneys with Dorsey & Whitney have billed the city at rates ranging from $345 per hour to $625 per hour, the invoices show. On four instances in 2023, three attorneys were working on the city’s case on the same day, the invoices show. There are dozens of instances of multiple Dorsey & Whitney attorneys — not paralegals or assistants — working on the same case on the same day. The invoices show the law firm didn’t bill for a paralegal or legal assistant in the 14 months. They show 78 instances in which Dorsey & Whitney billed the city for Dralle and Miller’s work done on the same day. The billing rate for Miller’s services has increased from $570 an hour in July 2023 to $730 an hour in March 2026, or 28%, the invoices show.
Whether their work was duplicative — as the county’s lawyers alleged — hasn’t been decided.
The invoices were obtained through a public records request the Storm Lake Times Pilot and Iowa Freedom of Information Council filed for unredacted billing records of the city’s attorneys in October 2024. City Manager Keri Navratil denied that request, citing attorney-client privilege and attorney work-product exceptions to Chapter 22, Iowa’s public records law. A second request yielded invoices showing hours and rates Dorsey & Whitney’s attorneys charged. Descriptions of the work provided were redacted, yet the city offered to unredact certain descriptions that didn’t contain attorney-client privilege or attorney work product for $500. The Times Pilot and the FOI Council declined to pay that amount.
Buena Vista County, by contrast, has released all of the invoices it has received from its law firm, Nyemaster Goode, through July 2026.
A review of 35 months of invoices shows that the Nyemaster firm billed the county for multiple lawyers working on the case on the same day–but, unlike Dorsey & Whitney, the firm never raised its lead attorney’s hourly rate. Graham has billed $350 an hour since Nyemaster was retained in August 2023, the invoices show.
The Nyemaster invoices didn't include line-item descriptions of services rendered — the same detail the county had requested from the city's invoices. But unlike the city's invoices, they weren't redacted.
Nyemaster has declined all requests for comment, citing ongoing litigation.
Storm Lake’s redaction of its attorneys’ invoices represents one of the most hotly contested freedom of information issues in Iowa, said Randy Evans, CEO of the FOI Council. Evans is an expert witness in a citizen activist’s lawsuit against the City of Eldridge over redacted attorney invoices.
That case is set for trial in October.
Evans said the council is closely watching the Eldridge case, which could reach the Iowa Supreme Court if the city loses. A plaintiff’s victory in the Eldridge case would “send a strong signal to Storm Lake that its redaction practice faces closer legal scrutiny,” Evans added.
“What will be playing out in court in Scott County in October is an example where (the FOI Council’s decision) could end up,” Evans said. “The city government in Eldridge has refused to make available unredacted attorney billing invoices for work that the city attorney was doing on behalf of the city. The refusal to make those available in unredacted form has led to a lawsuit.”
If the citizen prevails, Eldridge taxpayers will have to pay both the city attorney and the plaintiff’s legal fees. Iowa law allows for plaintiffs winning open-records lawsuits to collect reasonable attorney fees.
Evans noted the issues raised in the county’s resistance illustrate why the public’s access to the city’s invoices matters. The redacted invoices show no description of the services the city's attorneys performed over those 14 months. The invoices the county's lawyers used as a basis for their argument weren't completely redacted — they included some description of the services the city's attorneys provided. Those descriptions, Evans said, gave the county's lawyers a basis for arguing that county taxpayers shouldn't have to pay the city's attorney fees in the discovery dispute.
“There shouldn’t be any question at all that the public is entitled to know how much it’s costing for these lawyers to do this work in the name of the taxpayers and a description of the work being done,” Evans said. “The whole purpose of those invoices is for Dorsey & Whitney to be paid by the City of Storm Lake for their services rendered. It’s not to convey legal advice, recommendations or analysis of arguments that are advancing through.”
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