Page:Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee, 351 Ark. 31 (2002).pdf/78

108 done by the attorneys and costs incurred is woefully inadequate. There is a lack of records of attorney activity until 1998. For the existing billings between 1998 and 2000 there are days when the billings are quite unclear. The records also imply that, for at least three years, there was little, if any, activity at all. That would mean that over the years there was activity the attorneys were billing in excess of two thousand hours per year.

The use of school funds for other than their intended purpose is specifically limited by the Arkansas Constitution. Ark. Const. art. 14. See also, ''Special Sch. Dist. of Ft. Smith v. Sebastian County'', 277 Ark. 326, 641 S.W.2d 702 (1982). If fees and costs are to be awarded in a case involving constitutionally protected funds, then, at the very least, supporting documentation should be required. 

 G, Justice, concurring in part and dissenting in part. I write first to repeat my earlier dissent that this case should have ended when (1) then Chancellor Imber entered her orders in 1994, (2) this court dismissed the appeal from those orders, and (3) the Lake View School District failed to crossappeal from the chancellor's orders. See Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee, 340 Ark. 481, 10 S.W.3d 892 (2000) (Glaze, J. dissenting) (majority opinion now refers to as Lake View II). In Lake View II, my opinion was (and still is) that the chancellor erred when she stayed her 1994 orders for two years, and, if Lake View had appealed those orders, it would have been entitled to the injunctive relief it sought. As far as the acts the General Assembly enacted after 1994 in its effort to comply with the chancellor's decisions, Lake View and any other school district had the opportunity to challenge the validity of those acts in another suit. Clearly, those acts involved new and different issues to be argued and decided.

Instead, our court adopted a new review procedure and has provided for "compliance trials" in order to consider the constitutionality of any laws enacted since Chancellor Imber's 1994 orders. This court's action in this respect was well intentioned to provide a helpful hand in its attempt to rectify serious issues