Clark County employs almost 200 public defenders, whose job it is to provide legal representation to clients who can’t afford an attorney. These lawyers staff one of the nation’s busiest public defenders offices.
At the beginning of July, this busy staff were forced to evacuate their Third Street office after tests showed PCBs had surfaced. PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are known carcinogens. They have the potential to harm thyroid, liver and heart function. The US government banned their manufacture in 1979.
The president of the Clark County Defenders Union, David Westbrook, alleges the County knew about the contamination — and the ensuing illnesses — for years and chose not to remediate it. He says he and his colleagues grew increasingly suspicious as people continued getting sick.
"We were noticing anecdotally that a lot of people in the office seemed to be getting cancer, or respiratory illnesses, or having fertility issues," Westbrook says. Specifically, "people seemed to be getting breast cancer or other blood cancers," as well as having miscarriages. "There's been approximately 20 cancer cases, and that's certainly not a complete list in the last 10 to 12 years alone in our office ... there have been people who have gotten cancer and gotten seriously ill and come back. There have been people who have gotten cancer and died."
This led to bargaining demands.
"During our collective bargaining agreement negotiations over the last four years between the union and Clark County, we were trying to convince them to do testing of our building, so we could determine whether or not there was something toxic inside the building that was making people sick, or if it was just a coincidence," Westbrook says. The County, he alleges, said no. "They've been saying no to us for years."
He says County negotiators asked for sensitive medical records and family histories in an effort to prove that the causative effect was elsewhere — not from building contamination. That spurred office staff to source, and finance, their own testing.
"It was only after we got results from our own testing that the county decided that they would do their own testing and make it part of our collective bargaining agreement."
Even after the County's own tests came back positive, Westbrook says, the County "had our testing for months" — since February — while not acting on it.
Now that staff have been moved across the street into another County building, which Westbrook says is "not tenable" due to space constraints, he worries Southern Nevada's broader legal system will see impacts.
"I don't see how we can keep up our standards. There will be delays. There just has to be, because as dedicated as we are and as hard as we work, I don't see a situation where we can keep this up for six months, for a year, without there being some kind of consequences to [the representation we provide]."
A spokesperson for the county did not respond to a request for an interview. They did provide a comment, however, which reads in part, “The building has not been deemed uninhabitable. After initial testing, the County plans to develop a plan for source testing and any needed remediation.”
Westbrook says he's unsure how long this will take and County officials haven't kept them in the loop.
"They have not contacted us and told us when they're doing this testing," he says. "And then what happens once they conduct their testing? If they find sources for PCBs, they're then going to have to figure out how cost-effective and just how effective in general it would be to remediate the building to try to fix the problem." The problem then becomes finding a workable solution, which Westbrook says he can't imagine taking less than a year.
That uncertainty exacerbates anxiety. "When it's something as serious as this," Westbrook says, "it's very difficult not to think the worst. But that's what we're left with because of the lack of communication ... People are scared about the long-term health consequences. You know, are we going to get cancer 10 or 20 years down the road?"
Guest: David Westbrook, president, Clark County Defenders Union
