The district sold the two buildings for $1.8 million combined–so legal fees in trying to get the buildings back have now dwarfed what the district received from their sale.
TAPinto Newark has been keeping an ongoing tab of the legal fees that the public entities involved in the case have been spending. All three entities rely on taxpayer funding in one form or another, meaning that these fees are the taxpayers’ burden. The last time TapInto Newark checked, in December of 2023, legal fees had just surpassed $2.4 million.
“Unless there were provisions in the contract of sale to allow it, or the District is accusing the buyers of fraud or some other violation of the contract, it is exceptionally out of the ordinary to try to “claw back” a property sale,” said Marc Pfeiffer, associate director at Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University