The cost of banning Three Expo’s Exxxotica porn convention from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center is still mounting. Instead of reaching an agreement with Exxxotica’s founder J. Handy to settle the suit, Dallas hired a group of the most experienced and ideological business lawyers it could find to fight Handy in U.S. District Court.

Those lawyers, as the city continues to discover, aren’t coming cheap.

Wednesday morning, the city council approved another $175,000 to the two firms representing the city in the case. The council funded the lawyers with a 9-5 vote; Casey Thomas, who voted with the mayor’s 8-7 majority to ban Exxxotica, was absent.

This vote brings the city’s running tab in the case to more than $400,000. For scale, that’s about half of what the proposed 2017 budget allocates to solving the loose dog problem in southern Dallas. Put another way, DPD’s post-shooting response cost about $700,000 in police overtime.

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