San Juan County commissioners choose new county attorney
Aug 7, 2024, 3:35 PM | Updated: 4:22 pm
The San Juan Public Safety Building in Monticello is pictured on Saturday, April 18, 2020.
MONTICELLO, San Juan County — The San Juan County Commission has chosen someone to take over as the county’s top prosecutor.
Mitchell Maughan was selected Tuesday to fill the vacancy created by the upcoming resignation of Brittney Ivins, who is stepping down as San Juan County attorney next week. Ivins plans to take a new job as guardian ad litem for Grand and San Juan counties.
In a unanimous vote, the county commission picked Maughan over two other candidates who had applied. Maughan has been working since 2022 as chief deputy county attorney in the southeastern Utah county of just under 15,000 people. Before that, he ran a private law practice in Spanish Fork.
Maughan’s appointment covers the rest of Ivins’ term, which was set to expire in just over two years.
This is the second time since 2022 that San Juan County has dealt with the resignation of a county attorney. But unlike last time, the process of appointing Maughan was relatively smooth.
In March 2022, then-county attorney Kendall Laws announced his resignation, and multiple candidates – including Ivins – applied to replace him. Yet, the San Juan County Commission declined to appoint any of them and instead looked for other candidates from outside the county, ignoring a legal opinion that warned doing so would violate the law.
Eventually, after a lawsuit was filed, that search was halted, and Ivins was appointed. A judge later scolded two of the county commissioners – both of whom lost their re-election bids months later – for acting “for both partisan and personal gain” during the appointment process.
