Community Corner
Former Ross Valley Sanitary District GM Arrested in Philippines
Brett Richards had a felony warrant out for his arrest for the misappropriation of public funds, embezzlement and money laundering.
By Jessica Mullins
Nearly a year after he abruptly resigned from his position as Ross Valley Sanitary District general manager, Brett Richards was arrested in the Philippines on July 11, according to officials with the Marin County District Attorney’s Office.
Richards, whose whereabouts had been unknown since June 2012, has been charged with nine felony counts and was sought on a $1 million warrant surrounding a $350,000 housing loan he received from the district, allegedly inappropriately.
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The Marin County District Attorney’s Office used Richards’ financial records to track him to the Philippines.
The Philippine Bureau of Immigration and the Philippine National Police arrested Richards was in Moalboal, a municipality in Cebu, Philippines. After his arrest, he was temporarily housed in Cebu City before he was transported to the Philippine Bureau of Immigration detention-processing center in Manilla.
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Proceedings regarding his return to the U.S. for prosecution in Marin are scheduled for July 18. The exact date of his return to the U.S. is not known, but it’s anticipated to be within the next three to six weeks.
In September 2012, Richards was living off the radar but started publishing posts on the blog Ross Valley Sewer Truth.
He had been thinking about creating the blog for a while, he told Patch in an e-mail.
The blog, which has since been taken down, outlined, in first person, how Richards became the general manager for the RVSD in 2008 with a $197,000 annual salary. The blog never mentioned Richards’ name, but did call out several local leaders and was full of jabs at the Central Marin Sanitation Agency and other organizations, including the city of San Rafael.
Officials with the Ross Valley Sanitary District, which serves Fairfax, San Anselmo, Ross, Greenbrae and Larkspur, picked a new interim general manager in January 2013.
Finding an interim general manager took nearly six months for the sanitary district, which didn’t hire a head hunting consulting firm for the search.
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