NEWPORT — The lawyer who appears to be running Lincoln County boxed an embattled commissioner into a corner as her first order of business in 2026, then pulled the plug on the very next board meeting.

“There’s no business right now for the county to conduct,” said a straight-faced Kristen Yuille, head of the county’s four-person legal department and self-described administrator of county affairs. “Obviously I am taking on a lot of administrative duties and have done so since (former administrator) Tim Johnson departed. I don’t see a business need for this meeting.”

The cancellation of an upcoming BOC meeting, held twice-monthly on the first and third Wednesdays at the courthouse for the last 40 years, is irregular. Yuille’s comments came during a tense-but-laughable Jan. 14 workshop where she badgered Casey Miller and claimed there was nothing to discuss, anyway.

The workshop was ostensibly held to look at the application process for filling the vacant seat of commission chair Claire Hall, who died Jan. 4. Instead, the meeting highlighted the power vacuum left by Hall and the epic battle shaping up to fill it. Miller arrived with a list of ways to reform an embarrassing application procedure rife with loaded questions and obscure decision-making.

Yuille rejected Miller’s efforts outright, asking if he was trying to “micromanage” the county staff and accusing him of “wanting to pause the process,” as if those were implausible ideas.

“Why are you interested?” she asked an incredulous Miller, who looked like a witness at his own trial. “Staff put this (application) together. Your job is to appoint somebody.”

The session unfolded “virtually,” with Salem-bound Walter Chuck seconding Yuille’s comments from his car. When Miller called for a return to scheduled meetings in the courthouse board room, Yuille continued the lecture by downplaying in-person meetings.

“These hybrid meetings were used non-stop during the pandemic,” she claimed. “If you don’t have a vehicle, you don’t have transportation, you have work, then virtual meetings are more accessible. You have more public participation.”

Miller smiled incredulously at Yuille’s artful contentions, but must have felt their hidden meaning as Chuck and Miller agreed shortly after Hall’s death to share power, with Chuck as chairman for the first meeting, and Miller the second. Without a meeting to chair, however, Miller is powerless to set the agenda with pressing issues such as hiring a new administrator, restoring the District Attorney’s emaciated budget and fixing the county’s troubled finances.

Regardless of who the county commission appoints as Hall’s successor, all three seats will be up for election in the May 19th primary. Fates of others rest on the outcome, too, including the lawyer who would be queen, a harassed district attorney who wants wholesale change and the public, whose access to open government now appears limited to a computer screen.