I see a lot of chatter about Don Anderson's plan to open a Clearlake office for the district attorney.

It is a great concept, from my perspective, because I implemented that same idea when I was chief deputy district attorney in Santa Cruz County.

The actual feat had to wait for the right time to be accomplished, however. There had to be free county space of sufficient size and security, and the caseload, available staffing and office functions had to be workable.

In order to do that here in Clearlake, you have to consider that the staff of the district attorney is not currently large enough to give up the ability to assign attorneys, investigators and victim advocates to cover others when they are in a different court, in trial, out on vacation or training, or more importantly, to cover the caseload. When the staff is large enough, that is not a worry.

We currently have a domestic violence team, a child sexual assault team, an elder abuse team and a narcotics district attorney who are assigned to all the cases in their specialty even though they are in both Southlake and Northlake.

That means you cannot assign them to just the Clearlake office, even though it would be wonderful for those victims, witnesses and law enforcement officers located in the south county to be able to only go to a Clearlake office.

Felony district attorneys are only in Clearlake one day a week, and are required to be in Lakeport in court two days a week and two more days if they are assigned to do a trial in Lakeport.

There are two and sometimes three courts in the north that take trials and only one in Clearlake, so it is much more likely that felony district attorneys will be in Lakeport.

There are two district attorneys assigned to the misdemeanor cases in Clearlake. They are only in court one day a week and one additional day the third week of the month. They also are more likely to be assigned to trials in one of the courts up north. They are also required to be in the settlement conferences that are held in court in Lakeport.

You can see that there are days when the attorneys who might be handling cases that occur in the south county will not be able to be there. As a matter of fact, all of them may be required to be up north on the same day.

If the new district attorney covered the office on those days, that would be very helpful, but Don probably would not be familiar with every case filed in that court.

Also at issue is the availability of files in the Clearlake office.

To handle all the facets of office work that are done with the case files, it would not work to send staff to do it in the Clearlake office, because they are needed to cover each others work in the main office.

One would need to wait until more staff is hired so you could have duplicate functions covered in each office. A number of the important functions have only one person doing that job.

My suggestion to Don Anderson is that he hold office hours in the office in the Clearlake courthouse a couple of days a week, with announcements to the public so there will be a regular time when they know they will find someone there. That way, while he is looking into the money and logistical issues, he can also assess the need and response of the public.

It will be a lot easier to sell the Board of Supervisors on the expenditure of extra funds if he has the stats to back up the idea instead of just having the idea.

Jon Hopkins is the current district attorney of Lake County. His term ends in January.