Carbon County Commissioners Discuss Appointment of Public Defender Services

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Pictured above: local attorney Robert Oliver

The Carbon County Commissioners were tasked with opening sealed bids for contracted public defender services in the Seventh District Judicial District and Juvenile Courts of Carbon County and the Carbon County Justice Court during the regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday evening.

Two bids were received for this. The first was from Torgerson Law Offices. The bid stated that the proposal is in lieu of the previous contract with David Allred, who has left the area. The difference is a monthly rate of $14,000 in addition to each existing agreement. The bid continued by stating that the wish is to replace the former system as follows: Torgerson Law Offices and Oliver and Sitterud will legally divide the case load. This is more in line with the national recommendations rather than a single attorney taking a case load of 350 felonies.

The amount proposed is an $8,400 per month increase. The next bid was from Mark Tanner, who requested a total of $11,000 per month and stated that he firmly believes that he has everything at his disposal to serve the community.

Robert Oliver of Oliver and Sitterud was in attendance at the meeting and requested to speak to the commissioners.

Oliver began by stating that he, Torgerson and attorney Travis Blackburn spent a considerable amount of time coming up with a public defender system. He believes that the current system in the county has a need to be altered. A lot of research was completed and went into the proposal. According to Oliver, this was not the first time that he had spoken with commissioners about the contract.

“Mr. Allred did a great service to this county and he probably wasn’t compensated well enough,” Oliver stated.

Oliver obtained a contract from Allred from 2008 and stated that the amount paid then was the same amount paid today. This, according to Oliver, is the reason for such a great cost increase in the proposal. Additionally, Allred was servicing about 500 cases, which is well above the national guidelines. After 150 cases in a year, the guidelines state that the attorney is no longer effective as a public defender.

Oliver further explained to commissioners that he got together with other attorneys to create the system so that one person was not handling all of the cases alone. Essentially, he, Blackburn and Torgerson would take over Allred’s contracts. He then stated that his biggest point of clarification was that the $14,000 would cover Allred’s caseload and each attorney would equally take cases as assigned to them by the district court.

The commissioners took Oliver’s statements into consideration and stated that they were tabling the item to further discuss the matter amongst themselves.

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