With Del Norte County still lacking a chief public defender despite creating the position three years ago, District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey urged her colleagues to consider a different model.

Instead of the managed-assigned counsel model the Board of Supervisors approved in 2023, which consisted of a county public defender overseeing a department of contracted attorneys, Starkey hoped that establishing a traditional office would attract more applicants.

“We’ve leaned into a different model that hasn’t really been effective for us. We’ve recruited for it, but we haven’t been able to find someone,” she said Tuesday. “If we were to lean into a new traditional office — and that is the notice that’s going out, that’s what we’re marketing (for) — I feel we would get more of an applicant pool of people that have those career ambitions, to come in and create an office and establish permanency.”

Starkey asked Del Norte County Administrative Officer Neal Lopez and Human Resources Director Kerri Vue to modify the chief public defender job application to state that they will head a “traditional public defender’s office with staff.”

Starkey also invited Mono County Counsel Christopher Beck to discuss how his rural county established its public defender office using an appropriation from this year’s state budget. The appropriation included a total of $5 million to Mono, Del Norte, San Benito and Mariposa counties to bolster their public defense systems. Del Norte County received about $897,000 that needs to be spent by 2028, Starkey said.

“There’s (also) $1 million in a pot of money that we could apply for and it’s competitive, so it would be more like a grant,” she told Redwood Voice Community News on Friday. “We have until 2028 to spend it essentially, but we’re hoping we can still get ongoing funding if (the Office of the State Public Defender) sees it’s being used effectively.”

Mono County’s appropriation was $700,000 for public defense, according to an Aug. 11, 2026 Board of Supervisors agenda. According to Beck, his Board of Supervisors aggressively recruited a public defender and, within three months, hired a law clerk. Mono County is also seeking a deputy public defender. Eleven candidates are vying for the position, Beck said, “and all of them would be great.”

More than 10 hours away from Del Norte County, Mono County is east of Yosemite National Park. According to Beck, the county’s rural nature means that it doesn’t have a large stable of attorneys. If one of its contracted public defenders were to leave, he said, “we’d be on the state’s radar because we have nobody to backfill them.”

“The big thing that we wanted was just the public defender there so we could hire the deputy public defender and the law clerks and bring people in so we could build the stable going forward,” Beck said. “We used to have 35 attorneys and we now have one-and-a-half that aren’t already employed by my office, the (District Attorney) or as a public defender.”

According to Beck, after his Board of Supervisors approved the ordinance that created the public defender’s office, they left it up to the public defender to come up with the budget and figure out how to manage the contracted attorneys that fill in when there’s a conflict. When a deputy public defender comes on board, Beck said, it will be more like an institutional office.

“The way we want to take a step forward was to create the public defender and the public defender takes on the work going forward,” he said.

Del Norte County has historically relied on contracted private attorneys to provide public defense. The Board adopted a managed-assigned counsel model after receiving a presentation in October 2022 from Laurel Arroyo, director of capacity building for the state’s Indigent Defense Improvement Division, who said that in 2018, Del Norte County jailed more people per capita than any other county in California.

According to Arroyo, the private attorneys providing public defense were handling between 245 and 300 clients as of June 2022. She urged the Board of Supervisors to establish an institutionalized public defender’s office, which would include a chief defender, four attorneys, administrative and legal support staff and an investigator.

Arroyo also mentioned the managed-assigned counsel system saying that the advantages are that private attorneys don’t have to receive county salaries. However, the disadvantage is a lack of control over the attorneys that are providing public defense, she said.

“If you have private attorneys spending most of their time on private cases, they’re disincentivized to provide adequate and equal time on their indigent caseload,” Arroyo told supervisors in December 2022.

On Tuesday, Starkey said it will take time to establish a formal public defender’s office. That will happen through attrition, she said, “or perhaps the current contracted attorneys will see the value in working for a county not under a contract.”

Lopez also acknowledged that establishing a formal public defenders office will take time since Del Norte’s own pool of attorneys is small. Currently, the chief public defender is under county administration. 

“Developing that position and developing that support position, which the Board has already done and getting approval will establish that office and hopefully bring a person in who can take that to the next step,” Lopez said.