Orozco was born and raised in Wapato. He left to travel around the United States as a union organizer, returning in 2017 to help take care of his mother as she struggled with dementia. He says he never intended to enter into politics, but local business owners approached him and asked him to run, wanting changes for the city that they felt he could deliver.



Controversy has been a part of Orozco’s public life almost from the start. Following the November 2017 election, his opponent, high school teacher Hector Garza, was declared the winner.

Yet only four votes separated the candidates, and election officials had noticed a high number of ballots that were rejected during signature verification.

Yakima County Auditor Charles Ross told the Yakima Herald at the time that the high number of rejected ballots were unusual and "quite frankly, created a lot of discomfort statewide with auditors."

The Washington secretary of state told the Yakima County Auditor's Office to accept the new ballots that had been sent out to voters’ home addresses. By the time Monday rolled around, Orozco had been declared the winner.

Orozco’s time in the mayor’s office would not last long. In September 2018, the mayor called a special meeting without notice, contrary to the 24-hour notice requirement of the Open Public Meetings Act. He announced he had created a new position of city administrator. According to state auditor’s findings, his name had already been filled in on the contract. The city council approved the position, allowed Orozco to take it and voted in city Councilmember Alvarez-Roa as the new mayor. Orozco's salary went from $12,000 as mayor to $95,000 as city administrator. He had written the position for a contract of seven years and, if it ended early (even if he was fired), he was entitled to six months of severance pay.

Alvarez-Roa says if one looks at the surrounding cities, city administrators earn even more.

Orozco agrees.

Former City Administrator Juan Orozco pictured at Reservation Community Memorial Park Cemetery in Wapato on Sept. 24, 2018. (Courtesy of Amanda Ray/Yakima Herald-Republic)

“Actually, it’s not such a high salary. If you do a wage comparative study for the similar work, it's under what should be paid,” he says. “Without that type of position, nobody was running the city. It doesn't make sense not to have that type of position.”

Since Orozco became mayor, the Wapato Police Department has lost 14 employees to firings or resignations. Only 10 days into Orozco's mayoralty, he fired the city's police chief and accepted the public works director's resignation. In September of the following year, 10 officers — including a sergeant, police officers and corrections officers — released a public statement.

Their message was damning. They said Orozco had threatened and harassed officers and employees into intimidating citizens and directly targeting "his personal enemies or those that refused to support his policies and actions."

In one potent paragraph, they claim his use of the police department as “his ‘personal enforcers' is reminiscent of the days of old when corruption and graft were the norm rather than the rule of law."

Eight incident reports from the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office detail allegations against Orozco, accusing him of stalking, harassing and making threats to life and loss of employment.

One of the more serious complaints came from Cindy Goodin, who was a Wapato City Clerk Treasurer when Orozco was mayor. She says she was asked by Orozco to find a woman's address on Facebook because the woman had been filing public record requests. Goodin states in the complaint that Juan hoped the woman “came to the council meeting and that if she spoke, she would have to give her address and he knew a biker chick who had been to prison who would take this woman to the ground, cut all her hair off and cut her face.”

Asked about the allegations against him, Orozco says that he has "never" bullied or harassed anyone.

Not all of the allegations were filed with the county sheriff. Some are simply shared, in conversation and on social media.

Carrie Osorio, a teacher who has lived in Wapato for 13 years, was a vocal critic of Orozco on social media. As a result, she says, Orozco went to her place of work, a church, and asked her boss to pressure Osorio to stop posting about him.

"The whole thing is very scary, that he would try to find out where I live and go to my work and do that. But that's just what he does. He intimidates people,” she says. "When he came to my work, my pastor was pretty much trying to tell me that I needed to not actively oppose him so much. And I couldn't believe it. I was physically sick to my stomach. I said, ‘I can't do that.’ ”

Liz Villa has lived in Wapato her whole life. She has run the town's Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings at the community center since 2016. When she was ready to update the contract for their meetings, she says Orozco didn't show up for the required walkthrough. She posted about it on social media.

After that, she moved her meetings to the city park. Orozco interrupted a meeting to talk about politics for around an hour, she says.

Her husband, Jose Villa, was present at that meeting. He says that Orozco most likely learned about the meeting after people saw Liz’s post and called in to complain that he hadn’t shown up. They were on Liz’s side, he says.

Liz claims he then told her she needed to go onto her Facebook page and apologize publicly for her post on Orozco, which he saw as inflammatory.

"He said, ‘If you have meetings here [in the park], I'll charge by the hour.’ It's his city, it's his park, he can do whatever he wants," she says. “So I moved them to my personal backyard and home.”

Liz says of the 15 people at that meeting, none are still with the program. They expressed their frustrations to Liz about the encounter and weren’t comfortable returning to a public park, where Orozco could show up.

“He broke my spirit when he took my meetings away from me,” she says. “I want to break these cycles of drug and alcohol, and the meetings were the least I could do. He literally took that away from us."

Wapato public pool, Aug. 7, 2019. (Photo by Matt M. McKnight/Crosscut)

Jeanna Hernandez, a bookkeeper for the Yakama Nation, thinks her fellow residents aren’t treating the former mayor fairly. She was born and raised in Wapato and then returned 20 years ago. While she didn't vote in the 2017 mayoral election, she supported Orozco's opponent at the time. Orozco creating and accepting the city administrator position was wrong, she says, but she thinks what's happening in the town is a "witch hunt."

"I honestly didn't have respect for Juan Orozco in the beginning, either," she says.

Then, she got to know Orozco outside of his city role. She says she had a troubled past and Juan helped connect her to resources to put her life back together.

"I got to see him in a different light. I wish people could see Juan the way that I have seen him, the way I have learned to respect him,” she says. “You’ve just got to give people a chance. We all have horrible pasts that we’re not proud of.”

But she agrees the town is going through turmoil.

"It really has torn the community apart, and that's really sad because I think a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon [against him],” she says. “It's awful what Wapato has become."

Alvarez-Roa says Hernandez isn’t alone.

“All the business owners, they’ll support him,” she says. “The ones that are the loudest are the ones being heard, but if you go to the other people, the ordinary people, they’re happy with the way that things are.”

She lists the pool, which was renovated using misappropriated funds, as an example of how Orozco improved the town during his time. She says that it was simply inexperience that led to the mishandling of money.

“We had a city clerk that didn’t know where to pull the funds from,” she says. “So, yeah, maybe we did do that, but it wasn’t intentional. It just happened. That comes from a clerk who was not experienced and that’s all there was to it.”

The reasoning from the mayor didn’t sate the public’s desire for transparency. They manifested their opinions at the ballot box and all but wiped the slate clean.

Voters wearing bright blue “Keith Workman for Mayor” shirts were jubilant outside the tumultuous city council meeting, which took place the day after the Aug. 6 election.

Alvarez-Roa had secured only 22 votes out of 256 cast and won’t be moving on to the general election in November. Of the five city council members running again, all but one (who ran unopposed) received the lowest amount of votes in their position. Chuck Stephens in Council Position 1 will move forward alongside Workman, who is currently in the Council Position 7, but vying for the mayor’s office.

For the Villas, the election has given them new hope for their small town. They say they had considered leaving Wapato, until recently.

"With the new election and new faces … we've decided to stay. It can't get worse,” she says. “We have to rebuild this city. It's broken up families and friendships. We need to unite as one, not divided as two."