Allen to head Office of Public Advocacy

PALMER — A local district attorney has been tapped to head up one of the state’s two offices tasked with defending indigent Alaskans in court.

Rick Allen will take over the helm of the Office of Public Advocacy on April 11.

The Office of Public Advocacy acts as a fill-in for the Public Defender Agency when that agency has a conflict of interest and can’t work with a particular defendant. But that’s just one piece of what the office does. It also represents children, serves as a guardian for incapacitated adults, works as an advocate for victims of elder fraud, represents parents in child custody cases and represents people in adult guardianship cases.

Allen has worked as an assistant district attorney under Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak for the past seven years. He said that the change in jobs will be fun and exciting, but he has loved his time in Palmer.

“I love being a prosecutor. I love working in this office. I love the work that we do. It’s been a tremendously rewarding thing for me professionally to be able to serve the people of the Valley and the people of the state in this capacity,” he said.

Allen was born in Fairbanks, son of Bill Allen, the former mayor of Fairbanks and most recently the city manager of Palmer. He went to law school in Idaho and worked as a public defender there on an Indian reservation.

He then moved to Houston, Texas, his wife’s hometown, and worked there in a private law office. Houston, he said, is a challenging place for a lawyer to work. There is a lot of competition. But he said that experience was helpful in that by the time he came back to Alaska he had gained a lot of confidence. He was doing relatively well when he decided in 2003 to move back north.

“Money was not the thing, I just love Alaska,” Allen said.

He said his departure comes at around the same time another longtime assistant district attorney, Rachel Gernat, left to work for a private law office. That their departures came so close together, Allen said, is purely coincidental. But it might end up being a good thing for the office.

“There are attorneys in this office that have been doing this a long time and they are more than qualified for a promotion up to Superior Court and they just haven’t had the spot,” Allen said.

He said his job at the Office of Public Advocacy entails a daily commute to Anchorage where he will oversee a statewide network. OPA has offices in Bethel, Fairbanks and Juneau.

He said he’ll spend the next few weeks disentangling himself from his current job; wrapping up what negotiations he can; and finding other attorneys in the office to take over his ongoing cases.

With his new job he probably won’t be nearly the presence he was in the courtroom over the last seven years.

“When you’re the administrator, you’re just so busy with that,” he said. “Maybe someday a couple of years down the road maybe I’ll help out and try a case so my skills don’t get rusty.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.