Fired Public Defense Director says action left legal representation for the poor in disarray

Former Thurston County Public Defense Director Daryl Rodrigues said Wednesday he was “quite surprised” that the Board of County Commissioners terminated his employment Tuesday.

Rodrigues said they asked for his resignation, and when he declined, they presented him with a termination letter. He said he was given three hours to pack up his office, but he chose to use the time to meet with the office’s top managers.

He said he respects the commission’s right to handle its at-will employees, but wishes they would have given him time to work on a transition plan with his colleagues.

As a result, the Board of County Commissioners “threw the largest law firm in the county for poor people in complete disarray,” said Rodrigues, who was appointed to the post in 2013 and is the president of the Washington Defender Association.

“This is not the way lawyers leave law firms,” he said. “It’s not professional or ethical to just not go to work the next day.”

Public Defender Patrick O’Connor, who leads the office’s Superior Court team, will act as interim director until the position is filled.

Rodrigues is the second director to get ousted by the Board of County Commissioners since the beginning of the year. In early January, the three-member commission asked for the resignation of Tom Stuebner, who was the director of Thurston County Public Health and Social Services.

For many years, the board was controlled by Democrats, but that ended when Gary Edwards and John Hutchings were elected in November. Those two and incumbent Commissioner Bud Blake identify as independents and have vowed to bring sweeping changes to county government.

The commissioners “lost confidence in Mr. Rodrigues’ ability to lead the department of Public Defense, both financially and through personnel actions,” stated a news release issued late Tuesday.

Blake described Rodrigues as a “wonderful man,” but said the commission was unhappy with his leadership.

“Just from a standpoint of management of the department, we just saw things going toward a direction that caused the county a little bit of risk,” Blake told The Olympian on Wednesday. “Personnel actions within the department and some funding pieces there were not showing the greatest leadership, and we just wanted to kind of bring it to closure.”

Blake said many of those issues weren’t new, including a series of cost overruns that have spanned the past two or three years.

“Change has come about and new leadership and the board has distinctly decided to go with a new direction,” Blake said.

Rodrigues said his recollection is that his department was about $350,000 over budget in 2016. He said there was nearly a 25 percent increase in felony filings for the county during that time, including aggravated murder charges against two men that carried the death penalty.

Many of the cost overruns were due to payments to contracted attorneys and investigators because the county has only enough staff to handle about 55 percent of its cases, Rodrigues said.

“I’m a little bewildered that the expectation was for me to come in at the projected budget amount,” he said. “I have no control over what criminal cases get filed.”

Retired County Commissioners Cathy Wolfe and Sandra Romero said they believe the cost overruns were out of Rodrigues’ control.

“When you have a federal mandate that says everybody is entitled to an attorney, it depends so much on the rest of the system,” Romero said. “How can you know who the sheriff arrests? Who the prosecutor prosecutes? … I think that’s a systemic problem.”

Wolfe said Rodrigues played a key role in the establishment of several county programs, including the mobile crisis unit and triage programs, and the county’s policy and ordinance against holding people solely on a detention request from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“His vision is just incredible,” Wolfe said. “I think he was the greatest gift in Thurston County in terms of equal justice and improving the criminal justice system that I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m just devastated to see this happen.”

Rodrigues, who lives on Olympia’s west side, said he hopes to stay in the area. He said he enjoyed working for the county, and said he’ll remember it as a period in his life where he had “the right experience and the right skill set at the right time.”

“That — for any professional — is an incredibly rewarding experience,” he said.

This story was originally published March 1, 2017 at 6:12 PM with the headline "Fired Public Defense Director says action left legal representation for the poor in disarray."