When Stanko was elected as sheriff, he had an assessment of JCSO. The assessor who evaluated the public records department spent little or no time interviewing the records staff. Instead, she spoke almost exclusively with a part-time volunteer who had nothing to do with public records.

When the assessors’ evaluation came out, the records staff was outraged by her conclusions, which included claims that the records staff didn’t know who their supervisor was or what computer software we used.

In a meeting involving the sheriff, undersheriff, confidential secretary/supervisor, each point of the “evaluation” was discredited. Regarding Stanko’s assertions that he “decried the previous state of disarray in the department’s public records,” that disarray never occurred until after Stanko hired his friend as the supervisor/confidential secretary.

The staff was constantly reminding her of the records that she had sitting on her desk, that she had not yet assigned to anyone or even entered on the log. One time going as far as to accuse a records officer of having lost a records request, going through the desk and drawers only to find it on her own desk. There was never an apology.

Things got so bad, that the records staff went to the sheriff to discuss the issue with him. His response? Go talk to your supervisor. Considering she was the one repeatedly mishandling the records requests, that was not an option. Her incompetence resulted in a $50,000 lawsuit.

Regarding the property room and the allegation that it had not been inventoried in 20 years, the previous evidence tech was recently contacted and she confirmed that the evidence room was inventoried once during Piccini and once during Brassfield’s terms. In addition, the usual state audits were performed and passed.

Kay Roland

May Tracer

Port Townsend