Lincoln County Attorney's office seeks competitive pay

Budget time is rarely an experience anyone wants to go through and the growing pains of Lincoln County without a resulting increase in pay have left some county office employees frustrated.

One of them is the county Attorney’s Office, led by Marcia Boris. She lobbied the county commissioners at the July 12 meeting to increase the pay for a new deputy attorney to make it better to attract and keep people in the position. She also wanted to see a pay increase for Deputy County Attorney Jeffrey Zwang.

“We are on the brink of a crisis situation,” Boris told the commissioners. “We’re not doing a good job of attracting and keeping quality people.”

Boris said the county has six current homicide or attempted homicide cases.

“We are getting help from the state Attorney General’s office in two of them, but we are still involved with them in some form or another,” Boris said. “We have five felony trials scheduled in the new few months and these are all hands-on-deck cases.”

Commissioner Josh Letcher said the county is limited in what it can pay because the vast majority of the budget goes to the sheriff’s office.

“Ninety-two mills of the 99 we levy goes to the sheriff’s office and we are trying to balance all the department’s needs,” Letcher said.

Boris said she appreciates the work of the county sheriff’s office and understands the demands of their jobs, but she questioned other areas of the budget.

“A big question is where we are spending our money,” Boris said. “I obtained a list of positions within Lincoln County that currently earn more than $55,000 per year. They include all three commissioners, the human resources director, three employees in the clerk and recorder’s office, the treasurer, clerk of district court, 13 sheriff’s office employees, myself and my deputy, the justice of the peace, a misdemeanor probation officer, the library director, the planner, the network administrator, the forester, five health department employees and two asbestos resource program employees.

“I was unable to get job descriptions for these positions, however many of these positions do not require even a bachelor’s degree,” Boris said.

In discussing Zwang, Boris said he is currently making $75,400 annually. She is seeking an increase for his position to $90,000 annually to, “bring it in line with others in his position and for his expertise.”

“Jeff has been in our office for nine years, but we see other counties paying attorneys with no experience considerably more,” she said. “When Jeff finished law school, he returned home and lived with his parents for a number of years to pay down his student loan debt.

“The deputy county attorney position requires a doctorate level degree and admission to the Montana State Bar,” Boris said. “There are no qualified individuals currently employed with the county that could be hired internally and there is no interest in the position among local attorneys.”

Levi Roadman was the third attorney in the county office before he left to take a job in the state AG’s office earlier this year. Boris said they had one applicant for an intern position, but the person turned it down. There have been no applicants for the deputy position.

“When I came here in 2008, there were three attorneys in this office,” Boris said. “The state legislature has passed new laws on youth in need of care cases that has increased the workload. If we don’t fill the the second deputy position, we can not fulfill the statutory obligations we are required by the state to fulfill.”

Commissioner Brent Teske said the county may have to contract some of the work out.

“Things are tight and we can continue to discuss it, but we won’t know all the numbers until sometime in August,” Teske said.

“We’d prefer to have people come here and live here and be invested in the community,” Boris replied.

Boris said her office filed 205 felony, juvenile, commitment and youth in need of care cases in 2021 and 173 in 2022.

“We had 23 district court trials last year and I have had to ask for prosecutorial assistance from the Attorney General for the first time since I took office in 2017,” Boris said. “Our internal records show we had 176 justice court cases last year and it appears we are on track to exceed that this year.

“Our current caseload is not sustainable with only two attorneys in the office,” she said.

Boris said during training with the state AG’s office, “We were told that they are essentially maxed out right now and that we should seek assistance from neighboring counties with conflict cases.

“The problem with that is Sanders County does not have a county Attorney and Flathead County is not operating at full capacity,” Boris said.

According to reporting by the Sanders County Ledger, former county Attorney Naomi Leisz resigned in July after she was charged with felony insurance fraud.

In a June 12 letter to the commissioners, Boris made her case by explaining the disparity in salaries.

She wrote that when Roadman left the county to go to the Attorney General’s office, his starting salary will be $96,000. When Lincoln County hired him about a year ago his salary was $55,000.

Boris said the previous deputy county attorney, Cheryl Copperstone, left in 2021 to take a job in the Sanders County Attorney’s office at a starting salary of $85,000 per year.

Boris said at the department budget meeting on June 15 she wanted to discuss increasing both deputy position salaries, but that the commissioners wanted to address the possibility of an increase at a separate meeting.

“At that time we scheduled a meeting on June 28 to discuss the issue,” Boris told The Western News. “The day before the scheduled meeting, I checked the commissioners’ agenda to confirm the time and saw there was no meeting scheduled. When I questioned this, I was told that the commissioners had met on Monday the 26th and had decided to authorize an additional $10,000 and had declined to give Jeff an increase beyond the 5% given to all county employees. Nobody had notified me that this had occurred so I asked to meet to revisit the issue.”

That is what led to the July 12 meeting.

“I attempted to make them understand that was not going to be sufficient to attract any applicants because of the current market for deputy county attorney and public service attorney positions statewide,” Boris said.

The commissioners did approve raising the vacant deputy county attorney position to $65,000 at the June 28 meeting.

The cost of living in Lincoln County and the amount of student debt are other reasons why Boris wants to see pay increased.

“According to information from Glacier Bank, in the first quarter of 2023, the average home price is $353,714, down from an average of $514, 835 in 2022,” Boris wrote in the letter to the commissioners. “Additionally, law graduates incur an average of $165,000 in student loan debt. Over 75% of law graduates owe more than $100,000 at graduation and about half owe more than $150,000.”

Boris said when she graduated the University of Montana law school 15 years ago, her debt was $90,000.

Letcher asked if the deputy county attorney’s salary could be supplemented by the state, as the county attorney’s position is.

Teske said he’d bring it up with a state representative.