By Rob Ollikainen
Peninsula Daily News
PORT ANGELES — Clallam County is looking for its next hearing examiner.
Officials hope to appoint Mark Nichols’ successor in early January.
Nichols will resign from the half-time post when he is sworn in as Clallam County prosecuting attorney next Tuesday.
Commissioners on Monday directed County Administrator Jim Jones to prepare a request for qualifications for the hiring of a contracted hearing examiner.
Quasi-judicial hearing examiners preside over land-use hearings and make rulings on conditional-use permits in accordance with local, state and federal law.
Hearing Examiner pro-tem Lauren Erickson will handle the six remaining land-use hearings on the docket this year.
“My goal is to bring a recommendation back the first week of January for the new board to consider, because we need to get going right away,” Jones said in the commissioners’ work session.
“That would be my goal.”
Clallam County’s hearing examiner has been an in-house employee since Christopher Melly, now a Superior Court judge, became part-time hearing examiner in 2005.
Nichols, a former chief civil deputy in the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, was appointed to the position by two of the three commissioners in February. He defeated current prosecutor William Payne in the Nov. 4 election.
The proposed Clallam County budget for 2015 includes $91,439 for the hearing examiner, including $62,184 for salary and $22,380 for benefits.
“It seems to me that it would be a fair amount cheaper to contract out,” Jones told commissioners Monday.
Erickson is earning $100 per hour plus expenses as a contracted pro-tem Hearing examiner.
Jones recommended a per-hearing flat fee for the contracted hearing examiner, perhaps $2,000 per hearing.
Jones said he would issue a request for qualifications in early December, and suggested a committee review the qualifications of the applicants.
“We need to move on it,” Jones said.
“We’ve got to be ready by January.”
This year, Nichols and Erickson will have combined to hear 29 land-use hearings, the most in recent memory.
There were 20 hearings last year, 11 in 2012, nine in 2011, 16 in 2010 and 2009 and 19 in 2008, Jones said.
Officials attributed the spike in the number of 2014 hearings to conditional-use permits for recreational marijuana growing and processing businesses under state Initiative 502.
“They garnered robust public participation, which is great to see people participating,” Nichols told the board.
“The consequence of that was that hearings that may have previously taken an hour or an hour-and-a-half were taking six or seven hours, and that was with great effort to keep things moving as quickly as we could without constraining anyone in their ability to meaningfully comment.”
Commissioners Jim McEntire and Mike Doherty said they favored a contracted hearing examiner.
“There’s some uncertainties here, but I’m just thinking the RFQ [request for qualifications] route may be the better path to take,” McEntire said.
Said Doherty: “I’d tend to do that, too, as long as there’s a full discussion of the job description and public advertising of the position, some public process before it gets to the board.”
“That’s important,” he said.
Doherty objected to Nichols’ appointment as hearing examiner because it took place without the county advertising for the job.
He said it violated the spirit of equal-opportunity hiring and the open-government aspects of the county charter.
Nichols’ current hearing examiner position was originally combined with a half-time court commissioner, but the judges balked at that model and contracted their own court commissioner.
Commissioner Mike Chapman said he has always favored an in-house hearing examiner, in part because he or she would have an vested interest in the community.
“Now maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll get RFPs [requests for proposals] from local people, but last time we had people from Seattle,” Chapman recalled.
“We went that way, found out we were paying more and decided we could do it in-house cheaper. This thing ebbs and flows.”
Chapman noted that the position has served as a springboard to higher office. He cited Melly and Nichols’ strong records as hearing examiners.
“I think this is the kind of position you’d like someone invested in the community making these kind of decisions,” Chapman said.
“That served us well for the last decade or more.”
Doherty said the board can hire the most qualified candidate.
“You don’t have to take the cheapest,” he told Chapman.
“It’s a professional service contract, so you can go with quality.”
Said McEntire: “I think there may be a way to have the best of both worlds, honestly.”
“We can build some flexibility into the process of soliciting somebody or somebodies plural, and then have the options available to us when we make a decision on how that’s going to turn out,” he said.
Local attorneys have expressed an interest in the job, Jones said.
________
Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.