The Oklahoma Bar Journal November 2022

a month or less. Participation provides a tremendous benefit to your locality, and experience as an attorney can be invaluable to evaluation of the numerous types of issues decided. Also, be an advocate for your community! Pay attention to job postings in your city or town, encourage good people to apply, watch for economic development opportunities and support the folks who pick up your trash, fix your water leaks and stand in the freez ing cold to repair sanitary sewer lines. Rather than simply expressing frustration with local governments and their employees, commit to providing support and working to make things better. Shop locally and work to ensure that your tax dollars support your local government.

long way toward retaining qual ity municipal attorneys. I would encourage you to support your community by recognizing the difficulty and complexity of local government practice and offering to lend a hand when necessary. Volunteer There are many ways you can support your municipality. One of the biggest challenges I have noticed is the inability of city councils and boards of trustees to find qualified individuals to serve on their respective plan ning commissions and boards of adjustment. Municipalities cannot enforce their zoning codes without having active commissions and boards. In the smaller munici palities, these bodies meet once

THE THREE RINGS

Support Your City or Town Attorney In my experience, the average municipal attorney handles 33 dif ferent matters in any given week. Because of the diversity in prac tice, it can take numerous hours to get up to speed on a particular issue. The average reported law school debt of $160,000 1 further complicates the ability of small cities and towns to recruit and retain attorneys. Also, the larger Oklahoma municipalities are play ing a decreased role as a training ground for municipal attorneys who may be able to later serve smaller cities and towns. In the past, attorneys would gain experi ence in larger cities and then gravi tate toward smaller municipalities. For a variety of reasons, there has been lower turnover in the larger offices. Increasingly, openings in entry-level positions are being filled with experienced attorneys, which, in turn, further reduces the pool of qualified municipal attor neys available to provide represen tation to smaller cities and towns. Except for those attorneys who have stable practices, few can afford to represent cities and towns, keep up with the vast array of changes to laws affecting municipalities, learn all the different types of law asso ciated with the representation of municipal clients and attend quality continuing legal education on topics of importance to local government lawyers. The politics, egos, nega tive press, diminishing qualified workforce and other challenges also make representing municipalities far less attractive. Supporting your municipal attorney with words of wisdom, offering to conduct research on a particular issue and provid ing “heads-up” conversations in advance of public meetings all make a big difference and go a

8 | NOVEMBER 2022

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL