Sierra Madre ranked 17 among 88 cities in Los Angeles County for the amount of money spent per capita on attorney fees, according to a study by the Los Angeles Times.
The ranking was contained in a database resulting from a one-year project by the Times as it investigated the effect of legal costs on city budgets.
The Times found that Sierra Madre spent $454,078, or 3.3 percent of the city’s budget, on attorney fees.
That's $36 per resident. La Habra Heights and Burbank spent around the same amount per resident: $33 and $39, respectively.
Overall, attorneys' fees consume less than 1 percent of the 2010 budgets in nearly half the county’s cities, an average of about $25 per resident. But a handful of cities spend three to four times that much, the Times found.
La Cañada Flintidge was No. 30, spending $24 per capita. Glendale spent $17 per capita, while San Marino spent $10, according to The Times database.
