Low pay, big caseloads and greener pastures elsewhere have led to high turnover rates among deputy prosecutors in the Grays Harbor County Prosecutor’s Office. County Commissioners recently approved an adjusted pay scale to address it and attract new hires to the office.
Deputy prosecuting attorneys are key to the prosecutor’s office, working under elected Prosecutor Katie Svoboda, and handling all felonies, gross misdemeanors, misdemeanors, and probation violations, among other duties, in Superior and District courts.
“We’ve probably lost six over the last four years,” said Svoboda. “Money is a constant issue, and the workload as well.”
The Grays Harbor Prosecutor’s Office currently has a staff of 11 deputies and 13 support staff.
“We need 15 to 16 (deputies),” said Svoboda. The office hired one contract attorney to fill the gap, and is currently going through candidates for one new hire deputy prosecutor.
Turnover ebbs and flows with the economy. Svoboda said when the economy is stronger, as it is now, there is more work for attorneys outside of the prosecutor’s office, where the pay is often higher and caseloads almost always smaller.
There is also fierce competition between prosecutor’s offices and other public service attorney positions, like city attorneys.
“When we were hiring in 2010-ish to 2012 we’d get 50-60 applications for deputy prosecutor spots. Right now we have four applications (for the one advertised position),” said Svoboda. “This month the WAPA (Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys) employment bulletin board has over 25 listings, and we’re competing with all of those.”
Svoboda said it’s not just the prosecutor’s office; counties are having more trouble filling their indigent defense contracts, attorneys who contract their services to act as court-appointed defense attorneys.
The caseload in the prosecutor’s office has been on the rise. The number of attorneys in the office has not.
“In 2014 we filed more than 500 felony cases. In 2019 it was almost 840, a significant increase with no increase in attorneys,” said Svoboda.
Svoboda and Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Jason Walker carry 140-160 cases per year apiece. Prosecutors also carry their own appellate work, search warrant reviews, and other time-consuming – but necessary – work not faced by indigent defense.
Adjusted pay scale
Some relief is on the way. The Grays Harbor County Board of Commissioners Tuesday approved an updated salary schedule to put the county’s prosecutor’s office pay more in line with similar-sized counties, and updates the schedule to pay a potential hire based on experience.
In the old pay schedule, “if you came to the county with 15 years experience you still started at the bottom of the (pay schedule),” said Commissioner Vickie Raines. “There was no way to take into consideration previous experience, or have a ‘salary dependent on qualifications.’”
The county also approved an increase to salaries within the schedule, then will adjust the current prosecutor staff to the step they would be at when their experience is taken into consideration.
Svoboda said Tuesday the commission’s actions were “very good news, and I think it will help immensely. It certainly acknowledges the hard work our deputy prosecuting attorneys are doing.”
Before the recent adjustment, which is retroactive to Feb. 1, Svoboda said the pay hadn’t changed much since she started with the prosecutor’s office, and they’ve had attorneys who, by the time they reached the end of the month (they, like all exempt county employees, are paid monthly) they couldn’t pay the bills.
“When we’re looking at compensation, we’re not trying to be Thurston County, we just want to be competitive,” she said.
“Our salaries have been low, that’s why we did the market range analysis to see where we fall,” said Raines. “We will never compete with Thurston County, that’s just not going to happen, but we should be comparable with Mason and Lewis counties, and should be above Pacific.”
The new pay scale addresses that. As an example, a current listing for a Mason County Deputy Prosecutor II lists a salary range of $77,642-$92,035 annually, depending on qualifications. Under the new pay schedule, a current Grays Harbor County Deputy Prosecutor II will have his or her salary adjusted from $72,408 to $92,112 considering the level of experience.
It may also help prevent turnover, as well as attracting attorneys in the first place. Svoboda said the deputy prosecutors she’s talked to say they like the area, the quality of life, the makeup of the office itself, and appreciate how law enforcement works with the office, but when the money has been better elsewhere, they move on.
This has been especially frustrating when one considers the amount of training that goes in to a new deputy prosecuting attorney.
“We are always training attorneys,” said Svoboda. “I believe in giving the staff and attorneys all that support, or you don’t get a good product. It’s not throwaway work. We’ve had excellent attorneys, which is a double-edged sword,” in the sense that when they are trained they could find better paying gigs elsewhere.
The training experience for new deputy prosecutors can vary depending on their experience. For the first week or two they will be shadowing more experienced staff, said Svoboda, and she and the Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecuting Attorney will start feeding them cases. For major cases, they’ll start off as second chair with a more experienced attorney.
“It’s so frustrating when you get people from Lewis County or even Seattle that say, ‘thanks for training them so well and giving us such a talented attorney” when somebody moves on to another job from Grays Harbor County,” said Raines. “I saw that sort of thing when I was Mayor of Cosmopolis, we’d hire a police officer and train them, then when they weren’t getting enough action or pay in Cosi they’d go to Aberdeen or somewhere else.”
