Although she stopped paying her professional membership dues for a while when she had a baby, municipal attorney candidate Rachel Jones has an unblemished record with the Alaska Bar Association.
Jones and Cheryl McKay are two finalists for Sitka’s municipal attorney job who will be interviewed on September 5 by the Sitka Assembly. In an earlier round of interviews, a candidate for assembly, speaking from the public, asserted that Jones had been suspended by the Alaska Bar, and urged the assembly to investigate whether it was a disciplinary matter. It wasn’t. KCAW confirmed Jones’s good standing with the Bar at the time, and recently spoke with her to clarify the matter further.
Jones is a former Sitka Magistrate. She studied law at the University of California, Berkeley, and is licensed to practice law in California and Alaska. She says one of the things that isn’t necessarily obvious to the public is that “suspension” is used for both disciplinary and administrative reasons, like not paying fees or finishing continuing education on time.
“I’ve never been subject to any disciplinary proceeding whatsoever,” Jones told KCAW. “But I was suspended for failing to pay bar dues for a while.”
This caught the attention of Austin Cranford, a Sitka resident running for the second time for assembly. He urged the assembly to check up on Jones, even though she was up-to-date at the time of her first-round interview.
“I didn’t hear it mentioned during the interview, but I reached out to the Alaska Bar Association, and as of like, a week-and-a-half ago, two weeks ago, the candidate was under suspension with the Alaska Bar,” Cranford told the assembly after it interviewed Jones on August 8. “The Alaska Bar refused to tell me why they were under suspension. I don’t know if it was administrative or punitive, but I have a feeling the city should have known that before they interviewed, and why that question wasn’t brought up. So I’d like the city to look into that.”
Jones stepped down from her job as Sitka Magistrate in 2018, when her family moved to Siberia for her husband’s work as a Fulbright Scholar. She was actively practicing on her California license when she was in Russia, and hesitant to renew her Alaska Bar membership because of what she diplomatically calls “technical complications with the Russian government and [their] computers.” Then the pandemic hit.
“I was pregnant, actually at the beginning of the pandemic, ended up contracting long-COVID during my pregnancy, and ended up disabled and on maternity leave for pretty much the duration of the pandemic,” Jones said. “Didn’t have a penny to spare to get reinstated, and it wasn’t really on my mind.”
It costs $660 a year to maintain a membership in the Alaska Bar Association. Rather than practicing law on her return to Sitka, Jones used her legal skills for public policy and grant writing work. Then when the municipal attorney job opened up earlier this year, she gave the Alaska Bar Association a call to get reinstated.
“And it was just a matter of giving the credit card, paying those back dues, and I was reinstated,” Jones said. “So while I understand that that gap in employment might be concerning to Mr. Cranford, I was working on my California license, and then when I returned to work after recovering with the baby, kind of devoted my skills and my time towards Sitka’s housing crisis.”
Jones is one of two finalists for the municipal attorney job. The other is Cheryl McKay, from Anchorage. The municipal attorney, along with the municipal administrator, are the only two employees in city hall who work directly for the Sitka Assembly. The municipal attorney position has been vacant since the retirement of Brian Hanson in June.
