County public defender: appointment.

Senator Reyes’s measure would place the appointment of county public defenders squarely with the boards of supervisors (and, for multi-county offices, with the coordinating boards of the involved counties) and establish a removal mechanism requiring a three-fifths vote by the board for neglect of duty, malfeasance, misconduct in office, or other good cause, while preserving the role of local performance evaluation processes.

Section 1 specifies the appointment and removal framework: a county public defender is appointed by the board of supervisors, and a public defender serving two or more counties is appointed by the boards of supervisors of those counties; removal from office requires a three-fifths vote and specified grounds; a clarifying provision states that this framework does not exempt the public defender from a county’s established performance evaluation process for appointed department heads. Section 2 ties any state-mandated costs to the existing reimbursement framework for local agencies and school districts, with no new explicit appropriation identified in the text.

The changes illuminate a board-centric governance model for public defenders and introduce a high-threshold removal mechanism that could affect accountability dynamics within county offices, including multi-county arrangements. The bill preserves alignment with local performance reviews, while invoking the state-mandates reimbursement process if costs are deemed mandated. Procedural timelines or due-process specifics for removal are not specified within the bill text, leaving implementation details to local practice and potential future guidance.