A judge overseeing a pricey dispute between the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network and Marin County regarding SPAWN’s legal fees wrote last week that he needed more time to work out just how much the nonprofit may be entitled to. SPAWN has requested almost $1 million as compensation for successful litigation that forced Marin County to reevaluate how it regulates future development in the San Geronimo Valley. But Judge Paul Haakenson —who has ruled on previous litigation between SPAWN and the county—noted that some of the documentation regarding the time that SPAWN attorneys spent on the case appeared “quite vague” and explained that he would needed to closely examine and correlate billing requests with court minutes. SPAWN and Marin have clashed three times since 2004 over county code governing how and where residential development could occur in the valley, where one of California’s last remaining coho salmon populations make their annual runs. Michael Graf and Deborah Sivas the attorneys who led a team of students from the Stanford Law Clinic, requested $913,531.91 plus additional small expenses for conferring a “public benefit” due to an appellate court’s order that the county redraft a contentious streamside ordinance. David Zaltsman, the county’s counsel, has disputed the public-benefits-claim. SPAWN’s executive director, Todd Steiner, has previously said that if awarded, none of the fees would go to SPAWN. A hearing for a ruling has been postponed until Dec. 11.