Members of the Grant County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously Monday afternoon to appoint Kevin McCrae as chief prosecutor for the county.

McCrae, who was the only applicant for the interim role, said during a presentation to commissioners he feels his experience as a leader in the military and as chief deputy prosecutor for the county will serve him in his new role.

“I’ve led divisions of 15 sailors. I was an assistant department head with 125 sailors in the unit and in the prosecutor’s office, I’ve led the gang unit, the appellate unit and the civil unit, which are smaller divisions within the office,” McCrae said.

McCrae is a Republican and U.S. Navy veteran with experience in leadership positions. His education includes a master of business administration from Columbia College, which he said he believes will help him manage the budget for the department. His law degree is from the University of Washington School of Law.

McCrae is expected to take charge of the department on Jan. 1 due to his predecessor, Garth Dano, resigning from the position. In a letter to the Grant County commissioners Sept. 27, Dano said he would resign effective Dec. 31, 2021, “for personal reasons.”

McCrae has served in the prosecutor’s office since September of 2010 and said he has extensive experience assisting county officials in a variety of legal matters and handling different types of court cases. The seat he will fill through the end of 2022 has multiple legal aspects, including criminal, civil and appellate duties, he said during the presentation to commissioners.

McCrae is running for the office in 2022, when voters will decide who will fill the chief prosecutor’s role after Dano’s term would have expired, had he decided to remain.

McCrae said he enjoys working as a prosecutor because his office serves the public, rather than one man or woman other attorneys have as clients. With that, he said he is hoping to set up the office for success by increasing specialty skills. He said he feels the prosecutor’s office needs to take more cases to trial. When he first started with the office in 2010, he said the department was doing 40 to 45 trials per year. That number has now dropped to three or four cases per year, and McCrae said he wants the number of trials to be about midway between those two scenarios.

He would also like to move forward with developing drug courts for the county.

“Hopefully, we see that our drug court works out. … (There’s a) grant that we’ve been working on to attempt to expand our service to the community drug courts so that hopefully, we can get people where they need to be,” McCrae said.

McCrae said his first priority will be to get staffing for the department where it needs to be. Unemployment for attorneys is lower than in other sectors, he said, thus making the search for staff difficult for legal departments. However, he said options, like work from home programs and other recruiting tools, such as providing training, may draw the right people to the department.

“I would like to set up a district court supervisor and more mentorship for our junior attorneys so that they can grow professionally,” McCrae said. “I think part of a leader’s job is to develop the people working for them so that they can move along in their careers.”

(Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect a clarification regarding developing drug courts in the county.)