YAKIMA, Wash. -- Members of the Yakima City Council continued to disagree Wednesday over their split decision to pay Councilman Rick Ensey's legal fees against a threatened recall.

But they do agree that the decision did not set a precedent and that any future requests for finan-cial assist-
ance should be judged on a case-by-case basis.

Tuesday night, the council voted 4-2 to approve Ensey's request that the city of Yakima pay his legal expenses against a recall effort being waged by two city residents.

The state's statute on recalls expressly gives an elected official like Ensey the option of asking the City Council for financial assistance. One of the purposes of that provision is to protect public officials from the financial burden of recall campaigns based on false or frivolous charges, the Washington State Supreme Court has noted.

It's one key reason why Councilman Micah Cawley says he voted to defend Ensey.

"If you're a council member acting in your official capacity, you should be defended by the city," Cawley said, adding "I'd be worried that Rick could sue us for not paying his fees."

The city's own attorneys are prohibited from defending a recall, but the City Council can pay for outside legal counsel to work on Ensey's behalf.

The first-term councilman is the subject of a recall campaign over his role in a vote to change Yakima's budget policy earlier this year. Petitioners Charlotte Jones and Gene Rupel believe Ensey violated the state's open meetings law by working with Councilwoman Kathy Coffey and newspaper publisher Bruce Smith to line up four votes before an April 14 public meeting.

The petitioners must first get permission from a Superior Court judge to begin collecting signatures for a special election. No court date has yet been scheduled.

Pat Mason, senior legal counsel for the Municipal Research and Service Center in Seattle, said the question of legal fees in a municipal recall is twofold. The elective official must first request that his or her legal fees be paid, and then the government body must take a vote.

"There's a lot of discretion," Mason said.

Pat Dalton, assistant city attorney in Spokane, said the city did not pay former mayor Jim West's legal expenses during his 2005 recall, which was successful.

"We concluded it was a private legal issue he had to deal with," Dalton said.

Yakima's City Council opted to defend Ensey, saying they felt he was being singled out for an April 14 council vote that included four people. Voting with Ensey and Coffey to adopt the new Priorities of Government policy were Cawley and Councilman Bill Lover.

Joining Cawley in Tuesday's night vote to defend Ensey against the recall were Maureen Adkison, Coffey and Lover.

Mayor Dave Edler and Councilwoman Sonia Rodriguez voted no.

"For me this is the far-left crazies fighting the far-right crazies," Edler said Wednesday. "We need some sanity in our local politics. To me, you create sanity when you say you won't put up with it anymore."

He said Ensey brought the recall effort on himself starting with his "nasty" campaign against then-Councilman Ron Bonlender in 2007. Because Ensey won the endorsement of the county Republican Party, the race was widely seen as a thinly veiled matchup between the GOP and Democrats.

The open-meetings controversy was all Ensey's enemies in the Democratic party needed to go after him, Edler said. The two recall petitioners are Democratic precinct committee officers -- a fact that Ensey's defenders note in questioning their motives.

Edler and Rodriguez, in explaining their no votes, cited concerns about the unknown cost of Ensey's legal fees.

"You could say we just signed a blank check, and that's not the way to do the city's business," Edler said.

Rodriguez said she was troubled by the lack of estimates and the council's indifference to her advice that dollar limits should be discussed.

"Even if you are going to cover his expenses," she said, "that's not a fiscally responsible way to go about it."

Cawley acknowledged public criticism of the city's previous spending on outside legal fees -- for example, to defend its approval of the Walmart store in West Valley -- and that Yakima faces a projected $4 million deficit in the 2010 budget.

"I don't think the council's going to let this explode into a huge sum of money. I would definitely speak up if that were the case," he said.

Council members on both sides of the issue agreed that they would not defend a colleague without first reviewing the merits of a recall campaign, or if it was clear that a council member was guilty of wrongdoing.

Adkison described Ensey's predicament as a "very, very unique situation," and said she, too, felt that he was being unfairly singled out.

Adkison, a Republican Party activist who came on the council after the controversial Priorities of Government vote, decried the cycle of partisan payback.

"We'll never get anybody to run for City Council if people are allowed to do this kind of thing," she said of the recall effort.

* Herald-Republic reporter Leah Beth Ward contributed to this report.