How to resolve AdBlock issue? LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Two years after he was hired to lead Lake County’s newly created public defender office, the chief of the department has been hired by Monterey County.
On Oct. 14, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to hire Raymond Buenaventura to be its new chief public defender.
Officials there said they did an extensive search and settled on Buenaventura, who they credited with having a “vast amount” of legal knowledge and administrative service.
The Monterey County employment agreement with Buenaventura is for four years, starting on Dec. 1. He will start at the third of seven steps in that county’s salary range, which totals $273,245 annually.
Buenaventura did not appear or speak during the Oct. 14 meeting.
He also did not respond to several messages left for him by Lake County News seeking comment on his change in jobs.
Unlike the Monterey County Public Defender’s Office, which that county’s website said was established more than 40 years ago, Lake County’s current public defender office began in 2023.
In September of that year, the Board of Supervisors hired Buenaventura, then the mayor of Daly City and an attorney in private practice, to head up the new public defender’s office’s formation.
Lake County had a public defender’s office in the early 1980s, but due to high costs in order to deal with conflicts of interest for the attorneys involved, it was abandoned, as Lake County News has reported.
However, after the release of a report by the Boston-based Sixth Amendment Center, or 6AC, in early 2023, a year and a half after the county hired the firm to conduct an operational analysis of indigent defense services, the County Administrative Office and the Board of Supervisors became determined to form a new statutory public defender’s office despite past issues and concerns about the potential to double or triple defense costs.
To do that, the county made clear its intention to depart from its indigent defense contract model, which meant ending its contract with the firm Lake Indigent Defense.
At the same time, the process to hire Buenaventura was criticized by members of Lake County’s legal community, who faulted it for its lack of transparency.
Attorneys involved with defending indigent clients said they had not spoken to Buenaventura, hadn’t seen him observing cases in court and had no idea who he was before his hire.
His publicly available resume on LinkedIn showed limited experience as a public defender. Prior to being hired to head up the Lake County Public Defender’s Office, his only direct experience with that work was as a deputy public defender in Los Angeles County from 1993 to 1997. The county of Lake’s September 2023 announcement about his hire didn’t include information about previous public defender roles.
When the Lake County Board of Supervisors hired Buenaventura effective Oct. 16, 2023, it was at a salary of $184,225.60 annually.
As of this week, his annual salary totaled $204,360, according to Deputy County Administrative Officer Matthew Rothstein.
At his swearing-in ceremony on Oct. 17, 2023, Buenaventura told the board, “I take this obligation with great humility but also with great confidence that, together, I really do believe we can change and have a premier indigent defense program, a public defender’s office in this county.”
In his time with Lake County, Buenaventura appeared to have personally taken on a number of defense cases, according to Lake County Superior Court documents.
Buenaventura also was the subject of nine sanction cases filed against him in court between September 2024 and July 2025. Sanctions can be leveled against an attorney for a variety of reasons, including procedural violations.
Seven of those cases were vacated, with two of them resulting in Buenaventura paying sanctions at the order of Judge J. David Markham.
Markham has been critical of the public defender staff in court; in one recent instance, he faulted attorneys from the office for reasons including not showing up to court on time, being unprepared — including not having documents the court had given them — and failing to speak to their clients before coming to court.
It’s so far unclear about what’s next and who will lead the fledgling Lake County Public Defender’s Office.
Rothstein told Lake County News in a Monday email, “As of this writing, the Board has not received a resignation letter from Ray Buenaventura, and no recruitment has been initiated.”
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