Opinion: Clallam County Superior Court Must Find a New Court Administrator

Nine years ago, Lindy Clevenger stepped down as Superior Court administrator after 43 years with the county, having started as a clerk in 1974 and taken the top administrative job in 1997.

The detail worth remembering is what the judges said about her on the way out. Then-Presiding Judge Erik Rohrer told the Peninsula Daily News that he relied on her expertise and institutional memory on a daily basis. 

Judge George Wood credited her with assembling a 992-page petition that recovered $500,000 in state money for county taxpayers after the second Darold Stenson prosecution. The county commissioners honored her in the courthouse.

That is a portrait of a court administrator as a public servant: someone whose work product the judges could point to, and whose value to the county was measurable in dollars and in public confidence.

I have spent much of this year filing records requests with the office Clevenger once held. 

In my opinion, based on the documented record set out below, that office is no longer being run to an acceptable standard, and the three judges of the Clallam County Superior Court should find someone new to run it.

The Record

This is not a general complaint. It rests on two specific requests, both public, both documented.

On March 23, I asked the court for emails between Judge Brent Basden and Johnny Watts, the former Adult and Juvenile Drug Court coordinator who had been arrested that month after a standoff in Agnew. 

The request covered 2018 through 2024. The public interest was obvious: a court employee with authority over vulnerable people had become the subject of a criminal case, and residents were entitled to know how he was supervised.

Four days later, Superior Court Administrator and Public Records Officer Lacey Halberg denied the request in full. 

The emails, she wrote, were "categorically exempt under GR 31.1 as chambers records." She declared the matter closed. The administration would not say whether anyone had searched for the records at all.

I filed for internal review. On April 29, Judge Simon Barnhart reversed Halberg’s denial. 

Judge Barnhart wrote that "chambers staff" covers administrative personnel only when that staff is supporting a judicial officer at chambers, and that the court still had to determine whether any such emails existed and in what capacity Watts had been acting. He sent the request back to Halberg for further action.

Two weeks earlier, on April 10, the same office had issued the same kind of denial to a different request of mine, this one seeking search warrant logs for former Court Commissioner Brian Parker and for then-Commissioner Basden. 

Again the phrase was "categorically exempt under GR 31.1 as chambers records." Again there was no exemption log. 

This time the response added a sentence: "This is the final communication you will receive in connection with this request."

I want to be straightforward about how that second fight ended, because readers deserve the losses along with the wins. On July 13, Judge Barnhart denied my petition. He held that search warrant logs are chambers records, that chambers records fall outside GR 31.1 entirely, and that the denial was proper. 

I disagree with that reasoning and intend to take the question to a higher court via a writ of mandamus.

A Third Request, Still Open

There is an older file, and it is not about chambers records at all.

On March 14, 2025, I asked the court for all Superior Court guardian ad litem logs and appointments going back to January 1, 2000.

That request was handled without any of the friction that came later. Halberg responded with a letter, quoted a copying charge of $29.55, told me the office had no electronic payment option, and arranged for me to come to pick the records up. It was, by any measure, an ordinary and cooperative exchange.

The problem is what the production did not contain. The Olympic Herald has reported that Brent Basden served as a court-appointed guardian ad litem in Clallam County before he took the bench, testifying under oath in that capacity in a 2005 custody case. 

Yet, I have found no record of any Basden GAL assignment in what the court produced to me.

Yesterday, I asked the office to run the request again and to include those assignments. Halberg replied within two hours that the request was unclear and asked me to identify the records specifically rather than pointing back to an earlier request.

I raise it here because it goes to the same question the judges need to answer. A records office is judged on whether its productions are complete, and whether a requester can find out why something is missing without filing paperwork or hiring a lawyer.

And records are only part of this job. 

The court administrator also runs the personnel side of the courthouse: hiring files, background checks, the paperwork that decides who gets authority over families in this county. 

That is where the controversial Brian Parker appointment happened, and where his search warrant log went missing badly enough that the county's HR director had to demand it back. Judge the office by all of it.

The Forum That No Longer Exists

The clearest example this year did not involve a records request at all.

Until February, the Clallam County Superior Court ran an official Facebook page. It was where the public went for court notices and jury duty information. 

For a period, the page was configured so that only a limited set of users could comment on certain posts, including one celebrating Elizabeth Stanley's swearing-in as judge. 

After this paper wrote to Judges Barnhart, Stanley, and Basden about that arrangement, the restrictions came off and residents began commenting freely.

What happened next is documented in the county's own emails, which the court released to me.

On the morning of Friday, February 13, Deputy Court Administrator Kaysey Clayton wrote to county IT that she had tried to disable all comments and could not get access, and asked that all commenting be turned off immediately. 

She asked that she, Halberg, and Presiding Judge Barnhart be told the moment it was done. IT Systems Analyst Dean Anderson replied that there was no reliable way to switch off commenting across the page, and recommended the ordinary alternative: moderate individual comments, ban repeat offenders, and use filters.

Halberg then asked IT about some pictures on the page. Anderson identified them as part of the January 2025 post about Judge Stanley's swearing-in, and explained that individual photos could not be pulled out of a multi-photo post. 

Deleting the post was the only option, and doing so would take every public comment attached to it along with it.

By the following afternoon the entire page was gone.

I want to be careful about what that record does and does not show. It does not show anyone saying they wanted to delete the page to escape criticism. 

What it shows is a court's senior administrative staff trying to shut off public comment within hours of the public gaining the ability to comment, being told by their own IT department to moderate instead, and the forum disappearing the next day.

Government agencies are not required to run Facebook pages. But when a public body opens a forum and then closes it as criticism arrives, the timing is the public's business. 

Residents of this county lost a place where they could see what their court was doing and say what they thought about it, and no one at the courthouse has publicly explained why.

Why the Outcome Is Not the Point

Here is what troubles me, and what I think should trouble the judges.

Set aside who won each round. Look at the instrument. In both cases the office reached for the same tool: a categorical denial issued without any disclosed search, without the exemption log that tells the public what is being withheld and why, and, in the April 10 response, without the summary of review procedures that GR 31.1 requires in every response. 

That last one is not a close call about chambers doctrine. It is a line item in the rule. 

A records officer who tells a requester that a denial is the final communication he will receive is, in my view, telling him something the rule does not permit the office to tell him.

The July 13 opinion did not address that procedural question, or the argument that GR 31.1 does not reach records created before January 1, 2016, or the fact that when Parker was terminated in February the court could not locate his search warrant log and the county's Human Resources director had to formally demand its return. 

A judge is entitled to decide a case on the narrowest ground he finds sufficient. But those unanswered questions do not disappear because an opinion passed over them. They are administrative failures, and administrative failures belong to the administrator.

There is also the structural problem that this county cannot keep ignoring. Under GR 31.1, the internal review of a records denial is conducted by the presiding judge of the same court that issued the denial. 

In my case, that was the judge who had terminated Parker in February and to whom I had sent a statutory deadline reminder. 

I raise this as a criticism of the rule, not of Judge Barnhart's integrity. 

But it means the only meaningful check on this office, short of expensive litigation, is the judgment of the three judges who supervise it.

What the Judges Should Do

The court administrator serves the judges. The judges answer to the voters of this county, from Forks to Sequim. So this is properly addressed to them.

First, replace the leadership of the office. That is a judgment about performance, not a charge of wrongdoing, and the judges are the ones empowered to make it.

Second, separate the public records officer function from the court administrator job. Asking one person to run the courthouse and to serve as the neutral arbiter of requests for records about that courthouse is a design flaw.

Third, adopt written procedures and publish them: search first, log every withholding, include appeal rights in every response, no exceptions.

Fourth, document the personnel process. The family court commissioner job pays $213,714 a year, ninety percent of a Superior Court judge's salary, and it was filled on June 1 by Lorraine Rimson, who had served this court as a commissioner pro tem since January 2023. 

Whatever one thinks of that choice, the public should be able to see how it was made.

The last commissioner offers the cautionary example, and the record here is more precise than it is often described. 

On November 1, 2024, Halberg drafted Brian Parker's hire letter and wrote to county HR that she had not included the one-year probationary period, as directed by the judges. 

Parker went onto the bench in January 2025 without that safeguard, and the court terminated him thirteen months later. 

The court provided no public explanation for the departure of a judicial officer who had been deciding custody and protection order cases.

Read fairly, that hire letter shows an administrator carrying out a decision the judges made. That is exactly why this column is addressed to them. 

It is also worth stating that when I asked what training Parker had received in domestic violence or sexual abuse, it was Halberg who told me the court had no responsive records, and that Judge Basden had none either.

None of this requires the Clallam judges to concede that any particular denial was unlawful. It requires them to ask a simpler question: is this office being run the way the public has a right to expect?