In High Costs of City's Litigation, a Litany of Missed Opportunities Suppose you were in charge of New York City and had $10 million to spend. That's enough money to repave 65 miles of streets, or pay for 80 police officers or 159 teachers, or cover the cost of 887 seats in Head Start. Or, going all-out crazy, you could cut the personal income tax bill of every city taxpayer by $4.47, according to the calculations of the city's Independent Budget Office. Another way to spend that money is fighting lawsuits with scorched-earth litigation tactics. Here is a letter from a federal official dated Aug. 9, 2004, offering the city a way to avoid expensive litigation over claims that the city's Fire Department had discriminated against black applicants. The official, Electra Yourke of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, wrote that she was worried that a formal process known as conciliation would fail before it even got started. "As of this date, I have not even been able to convene a meeting with" city representatives, she wrote, listing possible solutions. The city wanted none of them, and a year and a half later, brought the discussions to an end. "I write to confirm our telephone conversation earlier this month," Georgia Pestana, a city lawyer, said in a letter on Dec. 27, 2005. The city "declines to conciliate." And that brought in the Justice Department, which filed a lawsuit in support of the people who had charged the city with discrimination. In 2013, the case is still rattling through the federal courts. A judge ruled against the city and appointed a monitor; the city appealed and won back a bit of ground. But most of the findings remained intact. So the lawyers for the people who sued are going to court to have their legal fees paid, to which they are entitled if the judge agrees that they are the "prevailing" party. "We asked for $8 million in fees, and $500,000 in expenses," said Darius Charney, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provided some of the lawyers for the winning side. The city will haggle over how much is owed, whether the hourly rate should be $525 an hour or $450, and so forth. So the city's bill will not necessarily be all $8 million claimed. But wait: what about the losers - the city Law Department? The city lawyers still get paid, of course; they worked hard, they had desks and computers, pensions and health care plans, vacations and bosses and secretaries and paralegals, heat in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer. So whatever amount the winning side gets - let's say it ends up at $5 million - you can roughly guess that the losing side will have already paid that much, too, for its own costs. There's your $10 million to play with. Or more than 30 miles of new pavement and 400 seats in Head Start. Why wasn't this case settled? The mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, has said the city was fair in its testing. "We tried to do a conciliation, but the city refused to participate," Mr. Charney said. Under Mr. Bloomberg and Michael A. Cardozo, the corporation counsel, the city has generally refused to enter into consent decrees - lawsuit settlements overseen by the courts. These, it was argued, unwisely limited the authority of managers. They stifled innovation. Experts would be second-guessed. And the city was not discriminating - or so it argued over and over. Given an opportunity to avoid the litigation that went on for years over the police stop-and-frisk practices and which recently concluded with a stunning loss, the city chose to fight, at enormous cost. Here's the missed chance: The city agreed in 2003 to settle a racial-profiling lawsuit that had been filed in 1999, under the previous administration. When the terms of that settlement were expiring in 2007, the stop-and-frisk numbers were just becoming public. The city declined to continue the oversight terms of the previous settlement. "The city bought themselves a new lawsuit," said Chris Dunn, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union. They could have extended the terms for a couple of years, which would have been a low-cost, no-cost proposition. Since Mr. Bloomberg took office, the budget for the city's Law Department has increased by more than 56 percent - almost double the rate of inflation, and much faster than nearly all city agencies except for the Education Department. The stop-and-frisk litigation costs will certainly run into multimillion-dollar sums. Asked how much the case has cost the city so far, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cardozo said the number was not at hand. Miles and miles of street paving, to be sure. E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com Twitter: @jimdwyernyt