‘From bad to worse’: Flood adds to public defender’s office woes, attorney says

After public defenders were evacuated from their longtime office in downtown Las Vegas, flooding in their current office space has made a bad situation worse, their union president said Friday.

“We went out of the frying pan and into the water,” said Clark County Defenders Union President David Westbrook.

In May, a letter from attorney Ryan Gormley to the county asserted that the Clark County public defender’s longtime office at 309 S. Third Street was contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, toxic chemicals commonly known as PCBs.

By July 3, office staff and staff from the county law library, which was also housed in the building, had been “evacuated,” Westbrook said previously.

Since then, staff in the public defender’s office have consolidated from multiple floors in 309 S. Third Street and 330 S. Third Street, both drab, aging county-owned buildings, to just two floors in 330 S. Third Street, which is known as the Phoenix Building.

“The Phoenix Building doesn’t have nearly enough space to house our office and to allow us to do what we need to do as public defenders,” Westbrook said Friday. “But another complicating factor is last weekend, there was a flood in the building,” apparently starting in a bathroom on an upper floor and spreading to all lower floors.

Floors and carpeting were soaked, he said, and public defenders have had to cope with noisy industrial fans as well as the air conditioning being broken in the only conference room in the building available to public defender staff.

The molding on the bottom of the walls in the building has been removed and early on, there was standing water, according to Westbrook, who described the building as humid. Crews have been working to clean it up, he said.

A spokesperson for the county did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

Westbrook said he does not know if it is possible to remediate the 309 S. Third Street building, and that public defenders need a suitable office in the interim even if it is possible.

He said he hoped current county administrators would help.

“We’ve sent proposals for acceptable office space that would work,” he said. “I know the county is talking about those proposals and I really hope they act on them and that they act quickly, because this situation went from bad to worse the minute the floods came.”

Gormley’s letter demanded that Clark County preserve relevant evidence and stated that the prior office was unsafe for occupancy.

“We represent several individuals who currently work, or previously worked, in the Building and who have suffered significant illnesses, including but not limited to cancer—conditions that scientific literature has causally linked to PCB exposure,” the letter said, according to a copy acquired by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “While we continue to evaluate the full scope of the medical and scientific evidence, we anticipate asserting claims arising from and related to PCB contamination in the Building.”

County spokesperson Stephanie Wheatley said previously that the building was not deemed uninhabitable, but that the county would make a plan for testing and any needed remediation.