• Photo

Herb Clay

Sphere IT

Save This Page

Reader Reaction

digg it

Clay says his job departure was planned

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Contrary to speculation, Herb Clay said he was neither forced out of his job as an assistant commonwealth’s attorney nor was his departure last week connected to his public criticism of the Marion Police Department.
“There was nothing sinister about it,” said Clay, reached at his home Wednesday, about his leaving the county’s top law enforcement office. I’ve been doing it almost six years. I’m a little burned out. It’s time for a change.”
Clay, a former member of Marion’s town council, said leaving his prosecutor’s post was not connected with his views about the Marion Police Department. His opposition to the reappointment of Chief Mike Roberts led to a confrontation with Marion Mayor David Helms during a town council meeting July 7.
Clay, a member of the town council’s police committee who failed in a council reelection bid in May, attended the meeting as a private citizen and spoke against Roberts’ reappointment, citing his long-standing concerns about the department’s operation.
Helms asked Clay, “Did you ask for a police committee meeting?”
“I told you my concerns,” Clay replied.
Helms repeated his question. Clay said he notified the chair of the committee and no meeting was called. He told Helms, “You are head of the police department. Once you learned a member of council had a problem, you are responsible to call a meeting.”
Helms repeated question again and Clay said he did not ask for a police committee meeting.
“Thank you,” Helms said.
Roberts was reappointed 4-1 with two abstentions.
On Wednesday, Clay said some people wrongly interpreted and questioned his presence at the meeting as representing his prosecutorial office.
“I was speaking as a private citizen,” something he pledged to continue doing.
“I will still keep an eye toward the town. I look to get back somehow with the town and I will speak with a voice loud and clear” on issues, he said.
Clay has served as a domestic violence and juvenile justice prosecutor, a position that, he repeated, left him feeling “burned out.”
Asked how long he considered leaving that job, Clay said he’d mulled it “in all actuality for the last year, the last six months especially. Sometimes you have to move on. It was a wonderful ride. It was my decision and I said my farewells.”
Clay said he plans to do a little private practice and running calls with the fire department. If I get accepted, I’ll be working with the rescue squad,” he said.
Clay said he would continue to practice law in Marion, but “not anything like it used to be. No criminal, something easy, simple, if you can say anything in law is easy.”