On June 30, 2022, Chris Petrini (and his firm Petrini & Associates) retired from his role as City Solicitor. In the late summer of 2022 the city started creating its own in-house law team. See the Source article below.
At the time Petrini’s retirement was announced in February 2022, Sisitsky told the Framingham Source, “It is my intention to propose a legal services budget for FY 23 that will fund a new in-house legal team. I anticipate that this change may result in a financial saving to the City,”
The city now has a in-house legal team comprised of a in-house city solicitor and other attorneys working under her.
In winter of 2023 we learned that the city, via it’s school department is still retaining Petrini & Associates for it’s legal matters. In fact Petrini & Associates is being paid in the city’s lawsuit against Durham School Services (bussing), in a case that’s about to get VERY expensive,
This lawsuit was filed by Arthur Goldberg, a Petrini & Associates attorney, in Janurary 2023, a full 6-months after Petrini & Associates were supposed to be off the city rolls… and several months after the city created a fully functioning in-house legal team.
Just a couple weeks ago, on and after March 1, 2023, the potential costs for this cases exploded when Durham argued that Middlesex Superior Court was not the proper venue for the case, and the case was moved to the United States District Court, for the District of Massachusetts.
Via FOIA we sought to determine how much money was being paid to Petrini & Associates for legal services that should be handled in house.
On March 14, 2023 the city responded with the following documents. The documents indicate that thousands have been paid to Petrini & Associates, and the city will continue paying them, all while the city has an in-house legal team, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
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