FAIRWEATHER

PROVIDENCE — Patty Allison Fairweather, who has been at the center of a string of controversies while serving as the top legal counsel at the state Department of Environmental Management, has left the state agency.

“She’s leaving by mutual decision,” W. Michael Sullivan, the DEM director, confirmed yesterday. He said she has been emptying her office for a few weeks and she will receive her salary from the DEM until the end of the month.

Jeff Neal, Governor Carcieri’s spokesman, said that while Fairweather has left the department, “The state is discussing with Ms. Fairweather what role, if any, she will have in continuing to provide legal services to the administration. No decisions have been made.”

Fairweather has been involved in a physical dispute with a fellow DEM lawyer, a controversy over her appointment to the state’s Judicial Nominating Committee and pointed questions about hiring an expensive outside law firm to handle a pollution case in Tiverton.

Fairweather did not answer her home telephone yesterday and left no forwarding number at the DEM.

Mary Kay, a veteran DEM lawyer, has been named interim executive counsel. Sullivan said he has begun the process of hiring another lawyer.

Sullivan said he respects Fairweather’s intelligence and dedication.

But he said she was working on a wide range of issues for the DEM and for other agencies, and he said he needs someone who could focus on the DEM.

Fairweather has been working through the Department of Homeland Security on earning a master’s degree, Sullivan said. That 18-month program requires students to be in residence for a total of 12 weeks either in California or the Washington, D.C., area, according to the department’s Web site.

Sullivan said Fairweather has also been working on the proposal by Weaver’s Cove Energy to locate a natural gas terminal in Mount Hope Bay. She has been helping the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency with legal issues, and she is embroiled in lawsuits over industrial pollution in a Tiverton neighborhood.

Carcieri hired Fairweather for his staff in 2003. She later moved over to the DEM.

Carcieri nominated Fairweather to serve on the state’s Judicial Nominating Commission in early 2007. Soon, it became known that she had been charged in 1999 with obstructing the police as they investigated her daughter’s role in a bomb threat at an East Greenwich school.

Fairweather entered a so-called Alford plea and the court filed her case. It was later expunged.

Also, Common Cause and others complained that state law barred the governor from appointing public officeholders to the judicial commission. State lawyers disagreed.

Not long after that, The Providence Journal reported that Fairweather got into a dispute involving the falsifying of another lawyer’s signature on a federal court motion.

Fairweather told The Journal she had the permission of fellow DEM lawyer Brian A. Wagner to sign his name to a court document. Wagner denied that. The incident caused a heated argument, with each lawyer asserting they were hit by the other. Wagner was fired. He responded with a lawsuit.

Three months later, Fairweather accused Jeffrey M. Grybowski, Carcieri’s former chief of staff and onetime deputy legal counsel, of a conflict of interest, in relation to the Tiverton case. He denied the charge and a judge later ruled that Grybowski’s activities were not inappropriate.

By summer, legislators were questioning why Fairweather failed to follow state purchasing rules when she hired an outside law firm for the Tiverton case and how the firm had generated bills totaling more than $1 million.

Sullivan said yesterday it was time for a changing of the guard in the DEM legal office.

“We need a different team structure here,” he said. “I need someone focused on organizational needs exclusively, someone to focus on DEM’s needs.”

plord@projo.com