Longtime prosecutor who made Tri-Cities ‘safer, better place’ receives top civic honor
Retired Benton County Prosecutor Andy Miller was honored Thursday night as the 2025 Tri-Citian of the Year.
As a nine-term prosecutor, he worked to keep the community safe while also recognizing that drug addiction and mental health issues were filling the jails and courtrooms.
In retirement, he’s been an advocate for creating the first public recovery and treatment center in the Tri-Cities where people can find help.
Miller, 71, was honored during the annual Tri-Citian of the Year banquet, at the Three Rivers Convention Center in Kennewick. By tradition, his identity was a closely-held secret until it was announced by Sharon Grant, the 2024 honoree.
“Andy Miller is a lifelong Tri-Citian who has put his life blood into making the Tri-Cities — his beloved “forever” community a safer, better place for all,” said the nomination, which outlines his exhaustive professional and volunteer contributions.
Tri-Citian of the Year was created by the Tri-City Herald in 1962 and given annually to local leaders who made a meaningful impact on the community.
After a hiatus in the 1970s, it was revived by area Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, who made it a centerpiece of their work to promote service above self. It is the highest civic honor given for public service in the region.
Elected nine times
Benton County voters elected Miller to lead the prosecutor’s office nine times, translating to a 36-year stint in office. When he retired in 2022, he’d served longer than any other sitting prosecutor in Washington.
No Democrat has been elected to office in the Tri-Cities since he stepped down.
Miller carried on a progressive legacy started by his parents, Shirley and Norm Miller, who moved to Richland from Kansas for a job at the Hanford site.
They raised the future prosecutor and his siblings in a five-bedroom home near the Columbia River in north Richland. They took up politics, focusing civil rights and immersing themselves in anti-segregation efforts, inspired by the sundown towns of Eastern Washington.
Norm Miller chaired the local Bobby Kennedy for President Committee and served as chair of the Benton County Democrats. The annual dinner held by local Democrats is named in their memory.
Andy Miller left home to study at the University of Washington and earn a law degree from Willamette University in Salem, Ore.
He returned to the Tri-Cities, where he joined the Benton County Prosecutor’s Office as a deputy in May 1980. He would later tell the Tri-City Herald his parents raised him to “not accept things the way they are.”
Lost race for state House
In 1982, while still serving as a deputy prosecutor, he ran against incumbent Republican Rep. Ray Isaacson for his seat representing the Tri-Cities in Olympia. Miller, then 29, lost by 423 votes, of 28,000 cast, according to Tri-City Herald archives.
Voters gave him the nod in 1986, when he ran to succeed his retiring boss as prosecutor. Miller, who had been promoted to chief criminal deputy, defeated a Kennewick attorney in the general election.
Four years later, he won re-election against a challenger. It was the last time he would face an opponent at the ballot box. Miller was unopposed in the the seven election cycles that followed,
He kept running, he told the Herald, because he enjoyed the work and because no two trials were ever the same. There was no shortage of murder and crime.
Triple-murderer Jeremy Sagastegui was a career-defining case for him. Sagastegui was convicted of capital murder and subsequently executed by lethal injection.
Miller was conflicted about the death penalty but was swayed by the cruelty against the youngest victim, 3, who was killed along with his mother and her friend in 1995.
It would be one of the last death penalty cases in the state. Two more murderers were executed before the Washington Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional in 2018.
Therapeutic courts take off
At the time he retired, Miller said he was particularly proud of the work his office did to support families and to help defendants address the drug, mental health and other issues that led to criminal charges so they could avoid committing more crimes.
He championed and chaired the task force that established therapeutic courts for drug, mental health and veterans. Defendants who have their cases tried in therapeutic court can have their criminal records cleared by completing treatment and meeting other conditions.
The Kids Haven program incorporates sensitive measures to ensure the comfort of children who must be interviewed for legal cases.
Miller is credited with building bridges between local Muslims and elected officials, supporting homeless teens through My Friend’s Place and working with local Boys and Girls Clubs to create programs for at-risk youth.
When he retired, Miller relayed he was advised by Gen. James Mattis, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, not to do anything for three months.
Miller said his fellow Richlander told him to “Get bored.”
Instead, he focused on building the Columbia Valley Center for Recovery at the former Kennewick General Hospital, which will provide badly-needed treatment facilities for people experiencing substance abuse or mental health disorders when it open.
The center is the long-held dream of the Benton Franklin Recovery Coalition. Miller serves on its steering committee.
As prosecutor, his reach extended far beyond the courthouse. Miller is a longtime member of Columbia Center Rotary, Friends of Badger Mountain, United Way of Benton and Franklin Counties and any number of civic organizations.
He supported Public Safety Sales Tax campaigns that convinced county voters to raise local sales taxes in 2014 and to make the increase permanent in 2023. The money supports law enforcement, the justice system and crime-reducing programs.
Though the job is partisan, Miller felt it shouldn’t be.
He decried one-party rule, saying it creates problems in areas when one side dominates, whether it’s liberals in Seattle or conservatives in Eastern Washington.
“I don’t think either is good,” Miller told the Herald when he retired.