Ben Sansone didn’t set out to fight City Hall. He just wanted to protect his neighborhood.
It was early 2015, and Sansone rallied a group of neighbors in Harwood Hills to by Reliance Bank to add a Starbucks with a drive-thru window.
The Des Peres neighborhood is just north of Manchester Road, and the development would have caused traffic backups in the neighborhood, Sansone argued.
The neighbors call that left turn onto Manchester going east a “suicide lane,†Sansone says. “It’s dangerous.â€
The residents won, at least initially. The Des Peres Board of Aldermen voted 5-1 against granting Reliance Bank the conditional use permit it sought. The bank sued. ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Circuit Court Judge Steven Goldman appointed a special master — prominent attorney Bob Blitz — to hear the case.
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The bank won.
Here’s where things got weird.
The city of Des Peres promised to appeal the decision, suggesting it had implications for cities throughout ºüÀêÊÓƵ County.
“This is a high-profile case among municipal attorneys and many are encouraging an appeal to protect municipal zoning discretion,†wrote city administrator Doug Harms in a weekly report.
Sansone, an attorney, and neighbor Mark Pedroli, also an attorney, volunteered to represent the city for free in an appeal. In preparing for that possibility, they asked the city for the transcript of the court proceedings with Reliance.
The city wouldn’t give it to them.
So they filed a Sunshine request under .
Still, no dice.
It’s not that the city doesn’t have the transcript.
“It’s around here somewhere, in my office,†Kevin O’Keefe told me this week.
O’Keefe is the contracted city attorney for Des Peres. He is a partner with , the law firm that represents many of the 89 cities in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County, as city attorneys, prosecutors and municipal judges. O’Keefe, for instance, is a city attorney in eight cities other than Des Peres, including Clayton, Hazelwood and Brentwood.
But O’Keefe and the city apparently don’t want Sansone to have a copy of the transcript, even if the one they have was paid for by tax dollars.
So Sansone and Pedroli went to court.
In September 2016, they filed an open records lawsuit in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Circuit Court seeking the trial transcript.
The city, with O’Keefe as its attorney, sought to dismiss it. The city argues that the transcript isn’t by law “retained†by the city, even if O’Keefe, their attorney, has a copy.
After the city filed a notice to appeal the underlying Reliance Bank case, it suddenly reversed course and dismissed the appeal, granting Reliance the right to build the Starbucks.
Undeterred, Sansone decided that if he couldn’t beat City Hall, he’d join it.
In April, he ran for the Board of Aldermen, and despite opposition from the mayor, city leaders and members of O’Keefe’s firm, he won.
The city still won’t let Sansone see the transcript.
So he wonders:
“What are they hiding?â€
It’s a fair question.
Not long after Sansone joined the Board of Aldermen, Starbucks pulled out of the project.
What remains is a new alderman and his attorney who still want to know what happened in that courtroom, and they aren’t giving up their quest.
“I think the city attorney is behind all of this,†Sansone says of O’Keefe. “He happened to mess with two lawyers who take government transparency seriously.â€
I asked O’Keefe this week for a copy of the court transcript in the Reliance case. He didn’t respond to my request.
The Sunshine lawsuit continues. And it could become expensive for Des Peres taxpayers.
“The City’s defiance of the law is not just purposeful, it’s un-American,†the petition filed by Pedroli reads.
“The Mayor and the City Attorney don’t seem to care about the liability they’re creating for the City, in fines and attorney fees, probably because the City Attorney and Mayor don’t think they have to pay for this from their own pocket. … The City Attorney or the city officials that wanted to blatantly violate the law should pay for this litigation, not the City because the City’s knowing, purposeful and continuing violation of the Sunshine law is stunning.â€