Arizona Has Spent $365K in June Alone to Defend SB1070

Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services has a story up that shows just how expensive Arizona's controversial anti-immigrant law SB1070 has become.

The article, State Paid 365 K in June to Defend SB1070, details the various legal costs that the state is incurring while defending multiple lawsuits. 

Arizona paid another nearly $365,000 in legal fees in June to defend the state’s new immigration law. ...The June invoice is on top of more than $77,000 the state paid the law firm of Snell & Wilmer in May, after the first lawsuits were filed.

So far the legal bills have not been passed on to tax payers.

But so far it isn’t directly costing taxpayers anything. Gubernatorial press aide Paul Senseman reported Thursday that total donations to a special defense fund Gov. Jan Brewer has set up now top $3.6 million. That includes a single donation of more than $1.5 million from Timothy Mellon of Wyoming.

However There have been a large number of legal filings already filed.

“There have been over 900 legal filings containing over 12,160 pages of legal briefings and new filings are received every day,’’ he said. And aside from the individuals who have sued to overturn all or part of the law, Senseman said 63 others have filed “friend of the court’’ briefs that need to be reviewed and, in some cases, responded to."

As the legal costs continue to mount as new lawsuits continue to be filed, media attention fades, the money from donations will eventually run dry and tax payers will likely be on the hook for large sums of money.

But the amounts to date are likely to be dwarfed with what is to come: The invoices do not reflect the fact that three of the cases actually went to hearings in July before U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton, something that likely required a lot of pre-trial preparation. And the state already has filed papers with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking to overturn an injunction Bolton ordered blocking the state from enforcing several key provisions while the issue of its legality winds it way through the legal system.

According to the Sedona Times, an Arizona paper, the state faces a budget deficit of 3.2 billion dollars. With legal costs mounting, in these hard economic times, does the state really need to be paying to defend Governor Jan Brewers bad immigration policy?