Excerpted from an Aug. 8 AJC interview with Cobb County Commission Chairman Tim Lee. He did not respond to requests to write an op-ed for this page:
Why did you hire (bond attorney Dan) McRae to lead negotiations? "I didn't choose him to be point man. When the Braves first came to us to talk about this prospect, clearly it was a big project and it had a lot of components to it. I wanted to bounce it off someone who had experience in the bond funding market that could help me understand if it was even feasible to try and do something like this… But he was not the lead negotiator for the county at all."
Why didn't he have a contract? "He was someone I sought out, saying would you mind helping me figure this out, just to see if we could move forward. Just as a subject-matter expert. And we never had a conversation about compensation."
The county attorney didn't know about the negotiations. Who was providing you with legal advice, if not Dan McRae? "Until my staff … got involved, everything up until that point … was as if you would do a feasibility gut check — is this something we should even move forward with? And he played a role in that, to include can we get to the point of an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) that we can all agree on, that we can bring forward."
So when talking about negotiations with the Braves, was that primarily you? "Primarily, yeah. In putting together what I thought would be best for the county to present to the commission for approval."
And McRae's role in that? "Just helping me understand what I could and couldn't do financially."
Isn't that the role of an attorney? "I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what their job is."
Why didn't you ask the county attorney for help? "I chose not to do that."
From an Oct. 2013 email from a Cobb Chamber account sent to McRae's law firm: "I am passing on to you the following provided by Chairman Tim Lee on behalf of Cobb County and its entities." "The county confirms the attorney-client relationship between it and Seyfarth Shaw as its project counsel/bond counsel for Project Intrepid (code name for the Braves' project)."
