L.I. taxpayers paid $1.6M-plus in Even-Year Election Law case led by GOP committees

Taxpayers in Riverhead and seven other Republican-led municipalities have collectively incurred more than $1.6 million in legal fees and costs for a federal lawsuit challenging New York’s Even-Year Election Law, a case in which Republican Party committees are lead plaintiffs.

Records reviewed by RiverheadLOCAL show each of the eight municipalities agreed to split the costs evenly, pursuant to a joint retainer agreement with the law firm that filed the case. Records show Riverhead paid $207,000 to cover fees and expenses for June through December 2025.

It is unclear whether the political committee plaintiffs have paid any part of the cost of the lawsuit. Suffolk County Republican Committee Chairperson Jesse Garcia said last week he is not aware of the county committee paying anything.

Campaign finance disclosure reports filed by the lead plaintiffs — New York Republican State Committee, Suffolk County Republican Committee and Nassau County Republican Committee — do not show any payments to the law firm, liabilities owed to the firm, or in-kind contributions identified as legal services connected to the lawsuit.

Who paid — and who apparently did not

The plaintiffs in the federal case are represented by Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors, a high-profile New York law firm charging a “blended” hourly rate of $650 for attorneys and non-attorney staff, according to a retainer agreement entered into last summer by Nassau County, Suffolk County and six Long Island towns: Riverhead, Brookhaven, Islip, Smithtown, Huntington and Hempstead.

Each of those municipalities agreed to share Brewer’s legal fees and costs equally, with each paying one-eighth of the amounts billed by the firm.

Those eight governments are among a total of 30 plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit, which remains pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

“The firm has been retained by all plaintiffs in the pending case,” Brewer Communications Director Alexandra Dukakis confirmed in an email Tuesday. She said the terms of retainer agreements with clients are confidential.

Garcia: GOP committee not paying, as far as he knows

In a phone interview last Thursday, Garcia said he is not aware of payments made by the county committee to Brewer, which he explained by saying he thought the political committees do not have standing to sue.

“It’s the governments — they have standing,” Garcia said.

Standing is the legal capacity to bring a lawsuit. In simple terms, to establish standing, a party must show an actual or imminent harm that can be remedied by the court.

The committees’ participation in the lawsuit, Garcia said, is “almost like an amicus brief.”

The Republican committees did not file amicus (“friend of the court”) briefs, which may be filed by entities that are not parties to an action. The committees are lead plaintiffs in the case.

Garcia referred further questions to the Suffolk County Republican Committee’s counsel, Steven Losquadro.

“All parties to the case have standing,” Losquadro said in a phone interview Friday.

He declined to answer questions about whether the Suffolk Republican Committee signed a retainer agreement with Brewer, whether it agreed to pay any expenses of the federal litigation, or whether the committee was invoiced by the law firm. Losquadro did not respond to a follow-up email sent Monday asking the same questions.

Private payments and campaign finance questions

A source close to the litigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said taxpayers in the counties and towns billed by Brewer were not the sole payers of legal fees and expenses in the case.

“Private individuals across the state have contributed in excess of one-half million dollars to support the litigation, which covers the participation of non-municipal plaintiffs,” the source said. Those contributions were paid directly to the law firm, the source said.

Dukakis, the law firm’s spokesperson, declined to say whether any private individuals who are not parties to the case have paid the firm directly to cover costs in the case.

“Unsurprisingly, payment arrangements are confidential,” Dukakis said in an email Tuesday.

Election law attorney and Fordham University School of Law Professor Jerry Goldfeder said Monday that if the political committees are Brewer’s clients, individuals can pay for the committees’ legal costs, but the payments should be reported by the committees as in-kind contributions — “assuming that the committees facilitated the fundraising and third-party payments to the lawyers,” Goldfeder said.

A spokesperson for the State Board of Elections confirmed in an email Wednesday that “expenses paid by someone else” are in-kind contributions. In-kind contributions must be “reported on the appropriate campaign financial disclosure report, and are subject to the same limits as monetary contributions are,” the BOE spokesperson said.

What the federal lawsuit seeks

The federal lawsuit, New York Republican State Committee et al. v. Hochul et al., challenges the 2023 Even-Year Election Law, which moves most town and county elections to even-numbered years.

Democrats say the change will increase turnout in local races. Republicans say it will bury local contests beneath federal and state races and advantage Democrats. Republican state lawmakers fought the legislation, enacted by the Democratic majority, as a partisan attack on Republican-led governments across the state. Many Republican opponents called it a “coup” by the state in an ongoing effort to undercut municipalities’ right to home rule, which is guaranteed by the state constitution.

Republican leaders of local governments, including Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, county legislative leaders and town officials, including then-Riverhead Supervisor Tim Hubbard, loudly complained about the perceived motives of Democrats in enacting the law and the impacts they believe it will have on the conduct of local elections.

The federal case asserts First Amendment and federal Voting Rights Act claims after Republican-led plaintiffs lost their state constitutional challenge in the N.Y. Court of Appeals.

Riverhead’s payments and the municipal retainer

The Brewer firm billed the eight Long Island government entities that signed the joint retainer agreement last summer a total $1.656 million through Dec. 31.

Two other Nassau County towns, Oyster Bay and North Hempstead, are plaintiffs in the lawsuit but not parties to the same joint retainer agreement. Those two towns each had separate retainer agreements with the law firm, according to meeting records published online. Oyster Bay’s agreement capped its responsibility for legal fees and expenses at $30,000 per year. North Hempstead’s agreement said it would join the lawsuit as a plaintiff but would not be responsible for any fees or costs.

It is not clear whether the remaining plaintiffs, including Orange County, the New York State Association of Town Superintendents of Highways and 16 individuals, have separate retainer agreements with the Brewer firm or have paid any share of fees and expenses to the firm.

Howard says fees exceeded expectations

Riverhead Town Attorney Erik Howard did not respond when asked whether he had been aware last summer that the Republican party committees were not obligated to pay a share of the costs.

Asked whether the committees have standing, he said, “I’ll defer to counsel for the political parties.”

Howard said in an email last week that he did not know the details of arrangements made by Oyster Bay and North Hempstead. He said he did not expect the case to generate the legal fees incurred in its first several months.

The Town Board on Jan. 6 approved a $105,000 budget transfer specifically for the Even-Year Election Law litigation, moving money in the 2025 budget from the workers compensation claims line to the legal services account. On March 17, the board approved another $66,000 budget transfer for legal fees, without naming which cases the fees pertained to. Those funds were moved from the retirement appropriations account to the legal services account. Neither resolution was publicly discussed by the board before the actions or discussed at the time of the votes.

The high costs led the town attorney “to seek a more limited fee arrangement,” he said.

A new fee cap retroactive to Jan. 1

Seven of the eight Long Island governments signed an amended agreement with the Brewer firm this spring. A March 23 modified engagement letter from Brewer capped total fees and costs at $50,000 per month, retroactive to Jan. 1. The amounts billed are to be divided evenly among the seven parties to the agreement, limiting each government’s maximum monthly share to $7,142.86.

The modification agreement omits one of the parties to the original agreement: Nassau County. It is not clear why Nassau County was omitted from the amended agreement, whether Nassau County signed a separate agreement with Brewer, and whether it remains responsible for any legal fees.

RiverheadLOCAL has a pending FOIL request for all Brewer invoices received but not yet paid.

Rothwell defends the lawsuit

Council Member Ken Rothwell, who voted to authorize the lawsuit and the retainer agreement, said in an interview Tuesday evening that he supported the lawsuit because he believes moving local elections to even-numbered years will diminish voters’ focus on town races.

Rothwell said he fears local candidates will be “lost in the shuffle” when voters are faced with ballots that also include presidential, congressional, state and county races.

“When you have a presidential election, it’s like, you start with the president, you go down into the U.S. Senate and the Congress, and then it just keeps going down to governors’ races to county races,” Rothwell said. “The fear was that residents, having to go all the way down the ballot, that the town elections would be at the very bottom.”

Rothwell said he continues to believe the lawsuit is justified.

“I strongly felt, and it was a unanimous decision at the time from the members of the board, that it was the simple fact that I felt like we were losing our identity in the election process,” he said.

But Rothwell seemed unaware of the equal-share payment structure in the engagement agreement Riverhead approved last July 1. Asked whether the board discussed how legal fees would be shared among the municipal and party plaintiffs, Rothwell said he understood larger municipalities were paying more than smaller ones.

“I believe that some of the larger-scale towns, based on population, have paid out more than the smaller towns have,” Rothwell said, citing the huge difference between Brookhaven’s population and Riverhead’s.

The engagement agreement approved by Riverhead says the opposite: each of the eight municipal entities was responsible for the same one-eighth share of the total fees and costs, regardless of town size.

Asked whether it was fair for Riverhead taxpayers to pay the same share as larger governments — and more than other plaintiff municipalities that appear to have capped or avoided payment obligations — Rothwell said he could not speak to the thought process of other towns.

“Is it necessarily fair? I don’t know that it’s fair,” he said. “But I believed in the lawsuit to go forward.”

Rothwell also said he did not object to taxpayers funding the litigation, even if Republican party committees are plaintiffs and do not appear to be paying a share of the legal fees.

“I think the decision, from at least from my perspective, wasn’t about who’s going to be in on it, who’s not going to be in on it,” Rothwell said. “It was about, is it a justifiable battle, is it the right thing to do?”

He said he believes the litigation is in the best interest of local taxpayers because local elections have the most direct impact on residents’ daily lives.

“I firmly believe that … this litigation … is in fact in the best interest of the local taxpayer,” Rothwell said.

Party leaders complain of partisanship

Suffolk County Democratic Committee Chair Rich Schaffer sharply disagreed.

“Question one is why are the taxpayers footing the bill for the Republican committees?” Schaffer said in an interview.

“This clearly has been a partisan issue. It’s already been decided by the highest court in the state, and I’m sure that these municipalities have better things to spend their money on than a high-priced law firm,” Schaffer said.

Garcia also described the law as partisan, but said Democrats are responsible for politicizing the issue.

“Democrats who have failed at the ballot are trying to change the rules of the game, so they can have a different result,” Garcia said.

Halpin says Riverhead should get out

Riverhead Supervisor Jerry Halpin, who took office in January, said the lawsuit is not worth the expense.

“It’s us fighting a fight for a political party,” he said, regardless of which party it is. Halpin is not registered to a party but ran for supervisor last November on the Democratic Party line.

“If the Republican party is not contributing at all, but they’re lead plaintiffs, that’s disturbing to me as a taxpayer, as a supervisor. It is why I would like to get out of this lawsuit,” Halpin said.

“Whether I agree with the law or not, whether I think the law is helpful or hurtful for our town, I just think that this lawsuit is not something that we as a town need to be a part of,” Halpin said.