After a little more than nine years on the job, Stan Garnett stepped down Wednesday as Boulder district attorney. Term-limited at the end of his current term, Garnett accepted an offer to return to private practice as a senior partner at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the Denver firm that employed him until his election as district attorney in 2008. Before he left, Garnett sat down for an extended conversation with Camera editorial page editor Dave Krieger on Feb. 22. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, edited for space and clarity.

Q: Let’s start with the county jail. You took the unusual step two or three years ago of coming out publicly and saying Boulder County government, which is run by your political party, had not been responsive enough on that issue. (Sheriff) Joe Pelle did the same. Since then, there’s been some movement to expand the jail’s capacity, but no visible movement toward reform — an alternative sentencing facility or programs to address the homelessness issue, the mental illness issue. What’s your assessment of where Boulder County is today compared to other counties around, and what’s your opinion of how well or poorly it’s done addressing that issue?

A: Well, I think the jail is a great example of both some strengths and a lot of weaknesses in Boulder County governance. Let me talk both about where I think we’re at in terms of decision-making and where we’re at in the reality at the jail. Let me start there. The reality of the jail right now is that we have a jail that is overcrowded, very overcrowded. It is outdated. It does not have the kind of humane, progressive facilities that I think the people of Boulder County would expect its jail to have, that would both make sure that people are housed in an environment that is appropriate, and then also has the kind of treatment, day-reporting, there’s a million different kinds of progressive things that can be done with people who find themselves in the jail to help them integrate back into society without committing more crimes.

Q: You’re talking about mostly non-violent offenders, correct?

A: Yes. Well, and even some violent offenders, particularly domestic violence — very complicated stuff. I’ve been dealing with this issue for 10 years. Even before I became district attorney, I knew it was an issue. I’ve been very frustrated that we haven’t made more progress than we have. A number of other counties are way ahead of us. Larimer County, for example, has a great program for substance treatment and other things that we just haven’t done because we don’t have the capacity.

Another problem with the jail is that our facilities for housing women inmates are both very small and insufficient for the population that we have. And I’ve been very frustrated we haven’t made more progress. Now, the jail is a tricky issue for me because, as the district attorney, I’m not responsible for the jail. The sheriff has direct responsibility for managing the jail, and the county commissioners have a statutory obligation to fund the jail. But because my staff interacts with the jail staff so much, and we see when there’s problems that occur in the jail that impact our cases, I have occasionally felt it was appropriate to speak out. I don’t want to do it in a way that undermines Joe Pelle’s leadership, but I do think we should have moved more quickly on this than we have.

Q: From a governance standpoint, do you have any feeling based on your experience why it is that certain issues like that one tend to fall by the wayside? Particularly with Boulder’s self-image as this progressive mecca, you’re talking about things that are pretty well known now as progressive steps one can take in criminal justice that Boulder is way behind on. Do you have any opinion as to why that is?

A: I do have an opinion. I think it’s due to a couple things. Number one, I think a real problem in Boulder County is term limits for county commissioners. The county commissioners have a very difficult job. It’s a very complex job. They’re administering a budget of half a billion dollars or more. They get elected, they get no more than eight years. They spend the first four years learning the logistics of it and the next four years figuring out who’s going to replace them. Prior to term limits in Boulder County, we had a number of very long-serving county commissioners who developed the institutional history and the ability to become the focal point for decision-making in the county. The best example of that is Jack Murphy, who the county fairgrounds are named after. Jack served as county commissioner for I think around 20 years. He really became the guy that knew everything, all the issues, and was able to make decisions. We don’t have that with term limits. I would like to see term limits extended to at least 12 years for county commissioners so they could develop the institutional history and also develop the inherent credibility and leadership that comes with being in a position long enough.

The other weakness I think we have in Boulder County that’s significant is we don’t have a county manager. Most large counties have a county manager who functions similar to a city manager in a city or a school superintendent in a school district. They’re an executive who reports to the county commissioners, but it’s an executive that can be kind of a repository of all the decision-making and all the history, etc. My colleagues in counties that have county managers, which is most of them, the district attorney, that’s who you deal with. You have a problem, there’s a budget, the roof leaks, you can’t figure something out, you just call up the county manager, you sort it out. We don’t have that. With our current system, decision-making is very diffuse. You have three county commissioners who inherently have not had enough time to become particularly powerful in their own right. They can’t make decisions except in public meetings when all three of them are there. And those of us that are running offices funded by them are often left in a position where it’s hard to communicate and it’s hard to get prompt decisions.

I think that’s impacted the jail because in a situation where you have a county manager, you have somebody who is the executive responsible for this issue, knew it was coming. What you see is more long-term planning. Back in 2000, when this began to be an issue, somebody could have said, “We need to get this fixed, come up with a 10-year plan and get it done.” And that just hasn’t happened.

Q: Who do you call?

A: Well, I call the commissioners from time to time. I like all three of them. They’re lovely people, very committed. But it’s not like you can call them and get a direct answer.

Q: But I mean in terms of staff, do you call the county attorney?

A: Occasionally I will call the county attorney. I will call the H.R. head, Julia Yager. I call Jana Petersen, who’s the head of administrative services. I call Michelle Krezek. It kind of depends on what the issue is. Again, one of the challenges as a district attorney is you have to figure out which silo does this issue fit within when you’re trying to address it.

Q: On a related topic, let’s talk about the justice center itself. What are the needs there that you think under the next district attorney it would be advisable for the county to address?

A: Well, first of all, the county has a good plan in place for building modern office space for the district attorney, which I’m very pleased with. It’s taken a while, but it’s happening. The justice center is a great example of what I’m talking about because back in the mid-’90s, every other county in the area, Adams County, Larimer County, Jefferson County, Arapahoe, Douglas, even Denver eventually, came up with a plan to build modern, cohesive justice and county government complexes. If you go to Adams County, the district attorney, the sheriff, county offices, the courts, are all in one area. Inmates can be transferred from the jail to the courtrooms safely, usually on underground walkways. The deputy DAs can walk to court. The sheriffs are right there.

For a number of reasons — I frankly think one of them was the JonBenét Ramsey case, which was kind of a sucker punch to law enforcement and to county government for several years — that didn’t happen in Boulder County. What needed to happen back then was to have somebody say, “We’ve got to find 100 acres somewhere, a big chunk of land, where we can build all the county functions in the same spot, including the courts, so we’re not wasting all this time and money driving inmates back and forth and lawyers back and forth and everything else.” That didn’t happen, I think because of what I’ve talked about. There was no county manager in place, there was not the long-term service of people to look long into the future, and commissioners were focusing on the issues in front of them that they were particularly interested in, rather than long-term county management issues.

So what we have is a justice center that’s in a very inadequate building in a horrible location. It’s in the floodplain. I’ve been told by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) reps that it’s considered to be one of the most risky placements for a public building in the entire United States. We don’t have enough parking. I have 85 employees. I think 17 of them live in Boulder County currently. The rest live in Weld County, Denver, Broomfield. So they all have to commute to work. Many of them are clerical people, support people. The county salaries are fine and there’s good benefit packages, but some of them are making $40,000, $45,000 a year, and they have to drive to downtown Boulder and there’s no parking for them. It’s a huge problem. We have jury trials where on the Monday when large jury panels come in, they can’t find places to park. We’ve had to negotiate an arrangement with the city of Boulder that they won’t ticket on Monday morning when we have juries coming because a lot of those jurors, who are there to be volunteers to serve the public, can’t park there. So the location is really inadequate and it’s a huge problem. Just the flood mitigation that’s gone into the recent construction has been incredibly expensive.

The next thing with the building is that the justice center was designed at a time in the mid-’70s, the same time that Fairview High School was built, and by the same architects, that had a particular approach to public building construction. It was very closed in. The justice center has a very kind of dark, closed feel to it. Here you are in one of the most beautiful locations in the world and there’s like no windows where you can see the mountains. Our courtrooms are very small. When we have a large trial, that’s an issue. Recently, particularly as I’ve been pushing hard on it, and the chief judges have as well, the county has really put the resources into it to do what can be done at that location. But the bottom line is that’s not a great location long-term. Every day, we have transport deputies in vans driving inmates back and forth several times a day between the jail and the justice center, which is not the most secure way to transport inmates, and it also uses a lot of employee time to do that and also the gasoline involved.

Q: You mentioned that a large majority of your workers come in from outside the county. Taking off your district attorney hat, just as an elected local official, you have 50,000 or 60,000 workers commuting into Boulder each weekday, facing a lot of the problems that you’re talking about. From a public policy standpoint, if there were a county manager and it was you, what would you do about it?

A: Well, again, our decision-making is very diffuse, both in the county and in our city governments as well. When I say diffuse, what I mean is there’s way too many people that get a stake in the decision. Sometimes, and this is particularly compared to the private sector, sometimes it’s most efficient to take one really qualified person and give them the decision-making authority and then hold them accountable. We don’t do that in the county. We don’t frankly do it a whole lot in the city.

The first thing I think needs to happen is that people need to commit to building affordable housing. And by affordable I don’t necessarily mean affordable in the tax-credit sense, but practical housing in good locations. I find it incredibly frustrating that in our community a place like Hogan-Pancost, which is a place where a significant amount of housing could have been built, instead gets purchased by the city for open space. What was the name of the development out there north of Boulder?

Q: Twin Lakes?

A: Yes. There was another opportunity at Twin Lakes to build practical, real housing that could actually house people with real jobs who need to get access to the middle of Boulder. That gets bogged down in NIMBYism and the kind of very intense debates we see on almost any land-use issue. So my view is, if I were the manager for both the city of Boulder and the county at the same time, I would simply say, to make Boulder accessible for real people with real jobs doing important work, like at the district attorney’s office or the courts, we’re going to commit to infill, we’re going to commit to building real housing in these locations, and we’re going to have the institutional fortitude to last through the inevitable neighborhood disputes that come with that.

Hogan-Pancost I’ve watched very closely because it’s close to my house. If you brought in somebody from another planet and said, “Here you’ve got a city that doesn’t have enough housing, and you have this field, which is in a great location, and sure there may be some issues about water and flooding, but good heavens, if they can mitigate the flood risk at the justice center, they can certainly figure out how to do it at Hogan-Pancost.” And that gets bogged down, and you don’t build housing there, and instead you buy it for open space, which means it’s never going to be able to be used for anything in the future.

Another great example of the same issue is CU South. There’s an area where, when I was on the school board, we talked about using that property to partner between the school district and the university to build an athletic complex. Because here’s another minor issue, which I would fix if I were the county czar. Boulder Valley School District does not have a good place to play football games. We have Recht Field at Boulder High, where they’ve been playing since my dad went to Boulder High. There’s no parking, it’s a very crowded facility. You could take the CU South facility and build a football stadium, tennis courts, soccer fields. It would be accessible to teams coming into Boulder. It could be a very practical use. It’s never happened because it gets bogged down in these kinds of disputes and I think that hurts the quality of life for people in Boulder.

Q: Being familiar with Denver, which is also one of the most liberal communities in the country, but demographically very different from Boulder, do you find a disconnect between Boulder’s self-image as extremely progressive and its resistance to developing housing for its own workforce, which is an exclusionary impulse?

A: Yeah, I think that’s really true. I think what happens, and I made this same observation about the culture of the legal community in Boulder: People in Boulder need to get out more. Of course, we all care about global warming. We all care about sustainability. We all care about making sure that the polar bears continue to exist and that the ice in the glaciers doesn’t melt away, etc. But what tends to happen in Boulder is that people will take these large-scale concerns and turn them into a debate over a very microscopic issue. The best example I have for this is years ago, and I remember this because I had just made the decision not to seek the death penalty on my first murder case, which was Joseph Abeyta. I made that decision, which I thought was a pretty significant decision, and got almost no comment. Nobody said anything about it. No letters to the editor, nobody called me. At the same time, in front of the school board was an issue whether to expand the parking lot at Foothills Elementary by something like 20 parking spaces. And this ended up being the subject of huge debate — several guest opinions, lots of letters to the editor, probably petitions, all focused on whether or not expanding the parking lot at Foothills Elementary School was going to increase global warming, whether it somehow was going to cause more people to drive, whether paving a slightly larger area would have an effect, whatever. So the issue is one of proportionality. Boulder people tend to forget that we’re a part of a much larger community and will be more credible on the issues where many of us share the same values if we know how to focus in a way that’s proportional.

Q: Part of the overcrowding problem at the jail has been the lack of alternatives for homeless people who commit various minor infractions, and the mentally ill. From a larger social perspective as a Democrat, imagining that you’re a policy-maker, Boulder’s camping ban has the effect of criminalizing behavior that isn’t necessarily criminal. How would you address that?

A: Well, it’s a really difficult issue. Let me say here’s another one where Boulder needs to remember this issue is not unique to Boulder. Every time I travel to another city — I mean, I was in Seattle and Portland and San Francisco recently, I just got back from Bolivia — I’m shocked at what a present, significant problem every city has with homelessness. I think there’s a couple of reasons why it’s such a problem in the United States, and then I’ll circle back to Boulder. First of all, we have definitely cut way back on federal funding for mental health treatment, and that needs to absolutely be addressed, because that’s a big chunk of the problem. Number two, we need to continue to do what we can on substance abuse. Number three, though, what’s interesting to me, and I’ve been traveling a lot in Latin America, is how Latin American countries have many problems, but they don’t have the problem we have with homelessness. I think there’s two reasons for that. First of all, their cultures are more collegial. I mean, we have a very individualistic culture in the United States, where it’s kind of like every man for himself, and if you have problems, that’s too bad, but we wish people the best and off they go. Other cultures, families take care of people, you make room for people, somebody doesn’t have a place to live, you bring them into your family, you take care of them. That’s part of the ethic. I think that’s a problem in the United States. The final thing that’s really interesting too that I’ve been thinking about a lot is the United States tends to debate every problem through the lens of civil rights. You see it in the gun debate. Rather than say “How do we figure this out?” everybody’s worried about whether new gun legislation is going to infringe on somebody’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. Other cultures don’t do that. With homelessness, we do the same thing. The advocates for the homeless community I think make a mistake by trying to model it after the civil rights battles of the ’60s, where, rather than saying, “Hmm, we do have a problem, you can’t have a bunch of people in sleeping bags sitting in the park, in Martin Park, going to the bathroom in the creek, etc., we need to do something about this,” rather than saying “How do we address this?” the debate becomes, is a homelessness ban a violation of someone’s civil rights under the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. I mean, obviously, nobody wants to violate anybody’s rights, but when you’re dealing with an issue as complex as homelessness, you need to be able to come into it and say, “What are we really doing here, and how do we address this, and how can we be fair?” And because we get so polarized over these issues, you end up not seeing a lot of progress.

Now, your question was what would I do. First thing I would do, I think, is centralize decision-making about homelessness. Again, it’s another issue where there’s a lot of really committed and caring people who care about the issues, but in Boulder County, it’s totally diffuse. The decision-making is spread all over the place. Longmont has its issues, Lafayette, Louisville, they all have decision-makers and funding, etc. Within the city of Boulder, you have the homeless shelter, you have Bridge House, you have the group that’s on and off called BOHO (Boulder Outreach for Homeless Overflow), which is housed in churches and synagogues, and they all have a stake in this, but there’s no one person who can come in and say, “OK, here’s what we’re going to do,” and then they can be held accountable. When you look at what cities like New York, or even Denver has made some progress with the issues, they have a strong-mayor system, they have one person who comes in and gets to make decisions that are not going to always be popular, but gets to make them, stick with them and be held accountable.

So I think within the Boulder community what we would have to do, I think, is merge BOHO, Bridge House and the shelter, so they’re all one entity trying to figure out how to meet this need, and then we’d have to have appropriate funding from the different cities, because what ends up happening is everybody has a stake in dealing with homelessness, but Longmont and Boulder end up being the two communities that have the largest homeless populations and it’s more of a regional problem.

Q: Supporters of the camping ban point out that taxpayers fund these public spaces and if they’re going to be usable by families and children, you have to be able to move homeless people off of them.

A: Yes. Totally agree.

Q: If you don’t want to put them in the jail, which is an inefficient, expensive and usually unnecessary thing to do, it seems obvious that you have to create a campground somewhere. You have to have someplace to send them, right? Why hasn’t that happened?

A: The campground idea is a classic sort of Boulder conundrum. First of all, you have land-use issues with that. Where are you going to put it? What code issues are you going to deal with? And then again you have no centralized agency that’s in a position to say, “OK, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to commit to it and do it.” You’ve got several different groups talking about it, you have the city of Boulder, which already spends millions of dollars on homelessness, and there’s some resentment, understandably, within the city of Boulder government about that, and then of course what’s even more difficult is because of the dynamic of the homeless population, there are going to be a certain number of homeless people who are not going to want to go to the campground, either. What tends to happen is when the camping ban gets enforced, a lot of homeless people go camp in open space, where again, it’s illegal there too, but often they can do it and not get caught. Some of our forest fires have come from that. So it’s a very challenging issue. But I think centralizing decision-making would help a lot.

Q: You touched on guns. That’s obviously a hot issue right now and as district attorney you’re dealing with criminals all the time where the presence of a gun changes the nature of the crime. This, too, seems like an intractable, interminable debate. After a decade of dealing with this from a law enforcement perspective, do you have any ideas as to how to deal with it?

A: I do. First of all, it is a real problem. Anybody who thinks that the proliferation of guns in our culture is not a problem doesn’t understand much about law enforcement. It’s a huge issue. Officers on the street worry about it all the time. It’s a factor in many of our cases. I think the thing that troubles me the most that I would like to see changed is we’ve got to rediscover the ability to debate and talk about all kinds of issues, but especially guns. What’s happened with guns is that many of the proponents of the current situation, who would call themselves Second Amendment advocates, have cast the debate so much in terms of slippery slope. In other words, you can’t talk about any regulation. The way I define slippery slope as a rhetorical device is you deflect from the discussion of the reasonableness of a proposal by suggesting that, “Well, that may be reasonable, but it’s going to lead to something much worse.” And that’s what’s happened with the gun debate. We need to rediscover the ability to say, “Let’s be reasonable. Let’s look at reasonable things that will work for people.” And then discuss among ourselves how to do that. The gun debate has become so polarized, and we’ve seen it in the last week, where people with different points of view have trouble just sitting down and doing anything other than yelling at each other about it. So I think we need to rediscover that on a number of issues, particularly on guns.

I believe that the Second Amendment, even under the recent Supreme Court cases, has plenty of room for reasonable regulation. And we need to pass and enforce reasonable regulations of firearms, just like we do with almost everything else.

Q: That raises the larger political question, which is Citizens United. The ability of powerful, moneyed interests to essentially underwrite campaigns to such an extent that politicians are beholden to those interests and they will represent them, whether that’s in the public interest or not, because that’s how they get in office and that’s how they stay in office. And I wonder if you agree with that interpretation and if so, given that it’s a Supreme Court decision, from a legal standpoint, how do you fix it?

A: Well, I do agree with that interpretation, and one of the reasons that I’ve spent, how many years, 17 years, in public life, in local government, is because money is not a factor usually in local government elections. You can raise 20 grand, that’s enough, and off you go. It’s a huge issue. I was lobbying for a group of progressive DAs back in November on what’s called the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which is a completely ridiculous federal proposal. And there are legislators who are afraid to even take a meeting with someone who is lobbying against an NRA (National Rifle Association) position because they’re so afraid of angering their NRA supporters. I travel in Latin America a lot now, and I got a funny question in Bolivia on Sunday when I was there. A justice of the Supreme Court asked me, “Why is there a National Rifle Association?” They’re like, “Why do you even have a group like this?” So, yeah, it’s a huge problem.

I think what you’ve got to see more and more of is real courage in public life, where people who are in office are willing to say, “You know what, me getting re-elected or serving forever is not the most important thing that happens.” You’ve got to be willing to say, and hopefully my stepping away from being DA covers some of this message, “These positions are the people’s positions. Nobody has a right to do this forever.” What’s more important is that you be principled and speak up for the right thing. I’ve had a fair amount of admiration for Marco Rubio. Even though he’s a Republican, I think he’s a really interesting guy. I was discouraged to watch him in that CNN town hall because he seemed afraid of saying anything as reasonable as, “We need to regulate semi-automatic weapons,” or even to say, “You know what, I’ll think about not accepting contributions from the NRA.” So that’s a concern to me.

Q: I apologize if I missed this, but let me go back to the legal analysis on Citizens United. Is there a legal argument that you think with a different Supreme Court has a chance to change that? Does that require legislation? From a lawyer’s point of view, how do you attack a Supreme Court decision that has opened the door to our current situation?

A: You didn’t miss it, I avoided it, because it’s a hard question. There’s only a couple ways. One, you could pass a constitutional amendment. I think that’s hopeless; I think it’s a very complicated task. The other is if you get another Supreme Court there’s definitely an argument that Citizens United is an incorrect interpretation of the First Amendment.

Q: Do you think that’s true? Do you think that’s not speech?

A: I do.

Q: Even the ACLU thinks it is a free speech issue.

A: I don’t.

Q: So you’re moving from the public sector to the private sector after making the reverse move a little more than nine years ago. What’s the biggest difference between them from your point of view?

A: I had a fair amount of difficulty, I have to admit, adjusting to the culture of public decision-making in Boulder County. And I think it’s because I came from not only the private sector but an incredibly competitive part of the private sector. Few people realize that the private practice of law at a high level is one of the most competitive parts of the American economy. If I’m at a firm like Brownstein and my client hires me to handle a major piece of litigation, there’s always somebody else right down the street at another firm that is going to propose that they can do the work better and cheaper than I can. So I’ve got to be focused on the economics of it, the quality of the work, the decision-making and how it’s handled. So what that means is you’re very careful about who you hire. You don’t hire more people than you need. You don’t put more people on a task than you need. You’re very focused on being effective and helping the client and getting the result they want at the most effective cost that you can for them. And so that means decisions get made quickly. You don’t spend a lot of time rehashing a decision that you’ve already made. If somebody makes a mistake, you learn what you can from it and move forward.

The public sector, at least within Boulder County, has what I would call pretty much a glacially slow decision-making process. As opposed to the private sector, where you try to centralize it and make the decision and move forward, there’s a tendency in the public sector to involve everybody in every decision. There’s a lot of talk about stakeholders, which kind of means we have a lot of committees where we hear from everybody, everybody gets to kind of weigh in, and all that gets processed for a long, long time. I found that very difficult to adjust to. A number of my friends in the county will tell you that I was a little impatient with that at first, and probably still am. I think that hurts the taxpayers because I think we sometimes forget in the public sector that we’re administering the taxpayers’ money for the good of the community, and that means we need to be efficient. I think there should be more zero-based budgeting in Boulder County, where you come in and just look at the organization; frankly, what journalism has had to go through as you’re dealing with the reality of journalism these days, where you have to say, “Who do we need to get the job done and what are we going to pay them?” I think Boulder County, I think the public sector generally, needs to do more of that.

Q: Don’t you think if you try to apply the standards of private business to government, in this community and in a lot of communities, you’d get the pushback that the public sector is essentially different because it does represent the public and it needs to hear from the public, whereas a private law firm doesn’t?

A: You might. One of the things I’m proudest of in my work in the office is that my first year in the office we did a very close look at the budget, basically zero-based budgeting. I replaced about a third of the lawyers in the office. I consolidated a lot of positions. We became much more efficient, saved the county frankly several hundred thousand dollars a year on the budget. I never was sure what happened to that money because it was hard to ever get it back. And I was very proud of that. We took an office that had a lot of positions where people weren’t doing much, consolidated, made some decisions about who should be in those decisions, and you can do that as DA because decision-making is centralized in the DA position and everybody’s an at-will employee.

Now, that didn’t mean that we were not responsive to the community. In fact, we’ve done a lot of outreach, more than any other DA’s office, to the community to get community input. We have a lot of progressive programs that the community is very supportive of. But we were light on our feet and able to make those decisions. I think the same could happen in other public sector offices within the county and elsewhere, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t. One of the things about being district attorney, it’s a very personal position. Every day you go to work and you know you personally are ultimately responsible for the decisions that get made. And that makes you very focused on who’s working for you, are they doing a good job, and are they handling things in a way that’s appropriate? Whereas other public agencies, there’s not somebody at the top who’s directly personally responsible.

Q: If the ballot issue had passed, extending the term limit on the DA to four terms, what would you have done?

A: I think I probably would have lasted through this term and perhaps into the next. One of the real issues about being an elected district attorney is it wreaks havoc on your retirement planning because you’re on PERA. PERA is a great retirement program, my wife’s a retired educator and it’s working great for her, but I got on PERA when I was 52 and PERA would not mean much for my retirement unless I got a significant number of years. Sixteen years would have got me there, 20 years would have been better, but 12 years of PERA is not great. So I’ve got two grandchildren, more on the way, I want to help with their college education, etc., and certainly part of the decision-making around this is what’s best for my family financially. Had I had the expectation of another four years, or, as in Pelle’s case, up to 20 years, to be the district attorney, it would have made it much easier for me to stay. Now, having said that, I love the private practice of law, I’m very excited about this and I don’t want to sound sour grapes-ish about the term-limits issue, but yeah, that was a factor.

Q: Do you think term limits were a mistake for local officials generally?

A: You know, it’s funny, because I used to say, absolutely. But the more I watch people I think some term limits are appropriate and are actually probably necessary. I just think that eight years is way too short, and I think they should be at either four terms or five terms. I do think you need to be able to force turnover at some point in these elected positions, but I have staff that have been in the office for over 30 years. My office position is the one position that is not long-term. So, yeah, it was a factor. It is what it is, and I’m glad to have this opportunity.

Q: Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck is known principally in the public realm as a lobbyist for powerful interests. When you move into their litigation department will you be representing clients that are pretty much antithetical to your personal political views? Will you be defending establishment, moneyed interests?

A: Well, I’ll be involved in litigation, which is trial work. And the people who get involved in litigation are people who have legal problems. In my previous 22 years with Brownstein, I represented everybody from John Elway, for 12 years, to a trucking company that was involved in the Summitville mine, to the entrepreneurs from California who bought the Baca Ranch and wanted to turn it into a water project and then decided to give it to the federal government and there was huge litigation. I will be very careful about who I accept as clients.

Q: So that’s up to you?

A: Yeah. But I will not hesitate as a lawyer to accept work from a client that has a legitimate dispute that needs to be sorted out in the courts who may see the world differently than I do. I’ve represented in the past plenty of Republican individuals and companies dominated by Republicans and I’m sure I will in the future as well. I’ll be very careful that it’s ethical and it’s appropriate, but I don’t have a litmus test, kind of a morality litmus test, for who my clients are going to be.

Q: Brownstein represented the oil and gas industry in its lawsuits against local jurisdictions that were trying to prevent fracking. It strikes me that the obvious difference between representing Elway, or some other client of different political perspective, and the oil and gas industry in its various legal attacks on Boulder County jurisdictions, is that you live here. Were you to accept such a case, you would be conducting a legal attack on your neighbors, essentially, trying to help commercial interests overcome policies adopted by democratic processes in your chosen place of residence.

A: The problem is the democratic process through the legislature and governor has not given local authorities the power to make these decisions and, as determined by the Colorado Supreme Court several times, efforts to do so through local ordinance have been preempted by the legislature and are constitutionally invalid. Am I happy about this? No, and in fact, as a matter of public policy, I think it is bad policy that local jurisdictions haven’t been given this power. If we can have a reasonable local voice on many other issues, from zoning to industrial activities of all sorts to where porn shops or marijuana stores are located, we should certainly be given the same for oil and gas operations. But, the legislature has decided otherwise, with the support of several governors. Rather than rage against the machine, we should exercise our rights as citizens in a democratic society and go about electing legislators and governors who will change our laws to give us this power. I get tired of local politicians pounding the table and claiming a power they do not have and, rather than doing the hard work to change the law, acting like their tantruming will do so.

But while we are waiting for this change to come about, I do not intend to be counsel for any oil and gas companies that are litigating with Boulder County cities. I understand why fracking is abhorrent and do not want to use my legal talent in a manner so directly adverse to my neighbors.

[As part of a follow-up email exchange, Garnett volunteered to be more explicit:]

Unless the political climate and the perception of fracking in Boulder County changes dramatically, I will not represent an oil or gas company litigating against a Boulder County municipality over oil and gas issues. Period.

Q: I can’t let a Boulder DA leave the office without asking about the JonBenét Ramsey case. You came in long after all of that had happened, and there are still people, I still get letters . . .

A: So do I. I got two this morning.

Q: I know you’ve done this, but on the occasion of your departure from the DA’s office, can you explain to the people of Boulder why that case was never resolved and whether you think there’s any chance that it ever will be?

A: First of all, I don’t think there’s much chance. It’s possible, but the issues, and a lot of times the public doesn’t understand this, but for a district attorney, all that matters is what’s the evidence. We have to have evidence that is strong and establishes clearly a theory that can be proven against a particular person. We don’t have that in Ramsey. I don’t think we ever will.

I’ve talked a lot about Ramsey. I studied Ramsey very closely before I took office and many of the changes that I made in the office early on, and I think I did a guest opinion on this several years ago, were tied to what I felt had gone wrong on Ramsey.

So here’s why I think it wasn’t solved. The first problem was really bad relations between the DA’s office and the police department. You have to have strong relations. People have to trust each other; they have to work well together. The police need to make sure they’re consulting with the district attorney the minute they find out about a major crime. In that era in the DA’s office, you did not have that. As a matter of fact, you had a lot of distrust between the two.

The second thing was that Ramsey happened at a time in the DA’s office where there was not a focus on going to trial and on handling trial. In fact, there was a lot of hesitancy about going to trial. Interesting data is that between 1991 and I think 2000, there were a couple of dozen homicides but not one homicide trial in that period of time. You did not have a team of people in the office who were skilled at evaluating evidence, focusing on it and know they could take a case to trial. I think that hurt.

Number three, you did not have any sophisticated grand jury capacity. You may remember in the history of the Ramsey case, one of the oddest parts was that it took forever to convene a grand jury. I think it was almost two years after the murder before a grand jury was convened. The reason for that in part was because (former District Attorney) Alex Hunter in that era did not have lawyers on staff who knew how to use a grand jury. Boulder County is a large enough county to have a statutory right to a standing grand jury, but they never used it in those days. Now, we have several lawyers that work with the grand jury all the time. We want to make sure that we can do that.

And the final point with Ramsey that can’t be lost was that there were real mistakes made at the crime scene in terms of preservation of evidence, decisions about interrogating witnesses that were mishandled, somewhat by the police, some would say due to the advice of the district attorney. I wasn’t there, I’m not sure exactly. But at a crime scene like that, if you don’t, a) realize it’s a crime scene, b) preserve the evidence you’ve got, c) separate and interview separately the witnesses involved, including the parents, if you don’t do that right then, there’s almost nothing you can do going forward.

And you know, I get, all the time, I’m sure you do as well in the press, letters, emails from people around the world who have theories about the Ramsey case. What they don’t understand is theories are not helpful. What we need is specific evidence that clearly proves a particular crime against a particular person. So that’s what I think happened.

Now, one of the things that the Boulder police have done is, after Ramsey, when Mark Beckner became chief, he put Joe Pelle in charge of the investigations unit in the Boulder Police Department. That was totally reorganized. They created a major crimes unit and the investigative capacity of the Boulder Police is far better than it was in 1996.

Q: Given Boulder’s lofty self-image, the three things that you pointed out — how to process evidence, how to interview witnesses, having litigators in a district attorney’s office — they all seem like no-brainers. I know you weren’t in office yet, but do you have a theory? How could a community of this alleged sophistication have none of those abilities?

A: Well, one of the reasons I ran for DA was the lack of trial experience in the office always puzzled me and I felt strongly about it. I decided the best thing to do was to run the office.

Q: Did you ever get an answer why that was?

A: Yeah, I think if you’re not going to trial a lot, it’s easy to get scared of going to trial. Plea bargains are always easier than going to trial — always, every frickin’ time. The office had a couple of tough homicide cases in the 1980s that they lost and I think that kind of spooked the staff. One of the things I’ve always been very clear on with my deputies is we don’t keep track of win-loss records. If you ethically have the evidence and you take a case to trial, we live with whatever the result is. I’ve never criticized any of my staff in the hundreds of trials we’ve had, which we’ve won most of them, but if they get a not-guilty verdict, that’s the voice of the community, it is what it is. I don’t think that was the sense in the community at the time.

I think there was also a fair amount of cynicism in the office about juries. I’m a real supporter of the jury process. I think it works great. You can convince yourself as a prosecutor because you have so much power that you can make better decisions than a jury will, and you can do that through the plea bargain. If you take the case to trial, that’s what you get.

And then the final thing is going to trial is a lot of work. We’ve got these people getting ready for the homicide trials this year; we’ve had a number of sex assault trials already. If the community knew how hard those people worked getting ready to go to trial, and then in trial, they would be very impressed. I mean, people work around the clock. It’s very intense. And if you don’t want to work that hard, it’s easy to plea bargain a case.

Q: I’d like to get your take on the sex assault issue with respect to the Title IX policies the federal government imposed on universities during the Obama administration. As you know, there’s a very robust debate about due process versus the difficulty of prosecuting he-said-she-said kinds of cases. I just read a piece by four feminist lawyers at Harvard Law School arguing the Harvard policy is stacked against the accused, that the Obama-era guidance created incentives to presume guilt. Where do you come down on that?

A: It’s a great question, I’m glad you asked it. As you know, I’ve gone back and forth myself on that. In fact, there were recently a bunch of changes at the University of Colorado in the police department and public safety, and I have yet to get a real straight answer as to why there were those changes. The police chief, Ken Koch, and the vice chancellor of public safety, Melissa Zak, who was a former police chief, both left. Ken and Melissa were terrific law enforcement people, very committed to strong criminal law enforcement investigation standards, which is what my priority has been all along. I have a hunch there was some tension between the university’s Title IX and other obligations, and traditional law enforcement.

I don’t know that it makes all that much difference whether we’re talking about a standard of proof of preponderance of the evidence or beyond a reasonable doubt or clear and convincing. I think the problem is created when the federal government decides to meddle in an issue that’s always traditionally been left to local law enforcement, which is the investigation and prosecution of criminal sexual behavior. And that’s what happened with Title IX. I had meetings with both the Boulder Valley School District and the St. Vrain Valley School District recently on this because it’s an issue in schools as well. How do you deal with sexualized conduct that may be criminal that also violates a school’s behavior code? One thing you don’t do is create federal legislation that’s supposed to apply to every university in the country and then tie funding to whether or not they comply with the legislation, which is what Congress has done. I think that’s a real problem.

I do know the people at the University of Colorado are committed to trying to get it right, and they’ve worked with us closely through the years when we’ve had conflict and tension, but it’s going to be an ongoing project.

Q: OK, let’s finish up by getting back to local governance. Boulder County has one-party rule, hasn’t had a county-wide Republican official elected in the 21st century, I don’t believe. As an outgoing official of the party in charge, would you have any advice for your fellow Boulder County Democrats as to how to be not only more effective but maybe a little less ideologically biased?

A: Yeah, I think to start with, this has been a theme of my exit interviews: People need to get out more. When I ran for attorney general, one of the great things about that was I went to every county in the state and I met with every Democratic Party in the state. The most interesting and productive Democratic Parties are the ones that have to fight to win all the time. El Paso County has a great Democratic Party. The ones that have become complacent tend to be like Boulder. They kind of turn inwards, they fight over kind of angel-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments and they’ve lost some vitality. So what I would say is people need to see Boulder County issues through the prism of what’s happening in the rest of the world, which means we need to have more interaction.

I also think we have to really fight hard, and this is a theme of mine, to maintain a culture of debate that is vigorous but appropriate and civil. Within the Boulder County Democratic Party there are times when it devolves into name-calling and lots of just nastiness that’s unrelated to the issues, which I think, again, happens with these kinds of parties that take for granted that they’re going to win.

The final thing I’ll say, and a lot of my Democratic colleagues will not like this but it’s the way I see it: The best thing that could happen for the Boulder County Democratic Party would be for the Boulder County Republican Party to get their act together. I’ve known good, qualified people who I’ve encouraged to run for office as Republicans because they’re Republicans, and they’ve said, “Our party doesn’t know where our precinct lists are. They don’t keep track of caucusing.” The party should be doing the mechanics — who’s going to support you, what are the phone numbers, etc. But I’ve been told, I don’t know, because I’m not a Republican, that the Boulder County Republican Party has just sort of let those mechanics of victory fall into disarray. If the Republican Party could run credible candidates, progressive but more conservative, that would challenge for all the main county offices, it would make Democrats better politicians, I think.

I actually also think that although Boulder County people tend to be liberal — you know, we have our own nuclear weapons policy in the city of Boulder, we’re always weighing in on what should happen in the Middle East, or this or that or the other thing — but when it comes to day-to-day issues, and I know this from both eight years on the school board and nine-plus years as DA, Boulder County people are very conservative in a very powerful sense. They expect good schools, paved roads, they want it to be safe, they want to know that their kids can go downtown to Pearl Street and come back and not worry about being assaulted, and those are very traditional, conservative values. I think if the Republican Party could get organized and bring forward sophisticated, thoughtful candidates, that they would have more success than they might realize, and I think that would be good for the Democratic Party because we’d stop the kind of naval-gazing we tend to engage in right now and figure out how to make sure that we’re in touch with what the people want.

Q: Are you going to move?

A: No.

Q: You’re going to commute to Denver?

A: Yeah.

Q: So I don’t have to ask what you’re going to miss about Boulder.

A: No, I love Boulder. Here’s one thing I should end with: our juries. I mean, I’ve tried cases all over the country. I’ve tried cases all over Colorado. I’ve probably tried close to 300 jury trials in my career.

Q: You’re talking private and public.

A: Yeah. I’ve tried ’em in Denver and rural areas of Colorado, several in Aspen, several in Florida, Texas, California, Chicago. I’ve never seen juries like Boulder County juries. This is the good and the bad of Boulder County, which we need to be honest about. Our juries care so much about doing a good job. They read the instructions really closely. They follow the evidence really closely. One of the rules of thumb as a prosecutor is a quick verdict is good and a long verdict is bad because a long verdict means they’re finding reasonable doubt. That’s not true in Boulder County. We have the longest verdicts I have ever seen. The Emily Cohen case that I tried a couple of years ago? The jury was out several days on that. They’re out several days because we have like 21 counts and they were going through every individual count, lining them up to make sure they got it right. Our joke in the office now is that Boulder County juries want to get the highest grade in the class. I mean, they want to make sure they did it just right. Which is a great thing, of course, because you don’t want people guessing at a verdict.

And then, afterwards, I’m amazed at how many times jurors come back and they want to talk to me about the case, they want to know more about how the police department works. On our sex-assault-on-children cases, it’s not at all unusual that jurors will come back and want to volunteer or help with Blue Sky Bridge, or something like that. That’s been a really interesting aspect. And also, that our jurors will almost always tell me that their jury service was one of the best things they ever did. You hear people talk about how they want to get out of jury service, and you’ll hear that here before trial. But afterwards, they’ll say, “We loved doing it.” And that’s the nice thing about the community.

On the day of the flood in September of 2013, it was raining for a while and we finally realized we had a flood. That was Friday. So everything was closed, and of course we were closed Monday and Tuesday the following week. I came down to the office Monday, navigating my little Prius through flooded streets and everything else. I finally got to the office and it was like 8 o’clock, and there were 12 people lined up outside the justice center at 8 o’clock on the day when everybody else was like hiding in their houses, because they had their jury summons, and they’d been summoned for Monday morning jury duty and they didn’t want to be late.

It’s an interesting community, a fun community to be DA. I think the community reaction to jury service is particularly rewarding and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve really been glad that we focused a lot on taking cases to trial. Because you know, the jury system is a great protection against corruption. Every prosecutor, every judge, everybody knows that ultimately 12 people that have no connection to the case get to decide what happened.

Email: kriegerd@dailycamera.com. Twitter: @DaveKrieger