NORRISTOWN >> The Montgomery County District Attorney made a very public plea to get his prosecutors more money at the county’s budget hearing Dec. 1. And it looks like he’s going to get turned down.
“Not at this time,” said Commissioners’ Chairwoman Val Arkoosh, when asked about whether the money would be added to the budget. “The district attorney is not the only department head who feels that his staff is not at a wage level that is comparable with our surrounding counties.”
While the county may not be able to find more money in the budget for prosecutors, District Attorney Kevin Steele has shown that he is, and will continue to be, a vocal advocate for higher salaries.
“I’m trying to keep this team together,” he said recently in an emotional interview about his assistant and deputy district attorneys. “They stay at significant self-sacrifice. They can all be making a whole lot more money other places.”
Currently, Montgomery County assistant district attorneys have a starting salary of $41,176, ranking at third out of the four counties that neighbor Philadelphia. Only Delaware County has a lower starting salary. Other neighboring counties have starting salaries between $45,000 and $48,000, and some counties in the state go as high as $67,000.
Steele asked the county for $236,917 from the county to get those salaries closer to what prosecutors make in neighboring counties. He wants to provide attorneys with extra money when they are scheduled for their on-call rotations and add to the starting salaries across the board.
“We worked with human resources to come up with a plan for increasing salaries to get them in line with other counties. So, by doing that, I would get the starting salary to $45,000, which is still below the other counties, but it’s a step in the right direction,” he said.
The district attorney was visibly choked up as he talked about prosecutors who left because they could no longer afford to pay rent, or law school loans, or move forward with life’s milestones. One prosecutor who left the office recently, “worked his tail off,” Steele said.
“He had his undergrad degree. He had a master’s degree. He had his law degree. He had stuck this out as long as he could. He’s in his mid-30s, he’s living on a friend’s sofa, and he is in a serious relationship and wanted to take next steps and he couldn’t do it,” Steele said. “He was tearing up talking about how he wanted to stay.”
Katie Colgan, a former assistant district attorney, left the office in March after spending nearly seven years prosecuting sex crimes.
“It was with a very heavy heart that I had to leave the office in March 2016. I say ‘had to’ because that’s really what occurred: my dream job was no longer an option when I realized that my monthly student loan payments, despite making each of the minimum payments each month (it was all I could afford), had grown to be higher than my salary,” she wrote in an email. “I watched so many talented and dedicated public servants, with years of training, expertise and experience, some of the brightest and best attorneys I’ve ever met, leave the office with the same heavy heart that I did.”
Both Steele and county officials recognize the work being done by the prosecutors. With high-profile cases being tried out of Montgomery County – former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane in 2016 and comedian Bill Cosby’s trial scheduled for 2017 – the work of some of the attorneys has faced an international audience.
“I want to be clear about the enormous amount of respect we have for D.A. Steele’s office and his entire team. We have seen on international display multiple times during this last year and I think they really have made us all so proud,” Arkoosh said. “They are truly dedicated public servants.”
The county plans to do a survey of salaries for its workers to see where disparities fall between how Montgomery and similar counties pay their employees. But, as Steele has already presented evidence that his prosecutors fall below average on that scale, he said he needs more than a county-wide raise of 2.75 percent for all non-union workers to staunch the turnover from his office.
“I have lost some important people on our team in this past year and I am afraid that I am going to continue to lose important people if they’re not compensated at a level that they can get by at,” he said.
Still, Arkoosh said the budget this year will not be able to accommodate his request for additional salary money, though the District Attorney’s Office did get a 7 percent increase in its budget for 2017 for operational expenses.
Moving forward, however, Arkoosh said the planned survey will help them assess where salaries should be raised, saying increases will be done “in a much more comprehensive way.”
“That will give us an objective assessment of how every department in the county is doing with its wages and what is comparable in the area,” Arkoosh said. “And we will use that document to guide us moving forward so that we have a more objective and comprehensive look at the salaries that are given.”
For the prosecutors in the office, though, waiting much longer for a wage that meets their loan payments may not be an option. Even those who have left continue to speak highly of the office and its attorneys.
“To create a salary structure that would enable the office to retain its attorneys and their years of experience, it would allow these attorneys to continue to serve the public in the way they were trained and meant to serve,” Colgan wrote. “The benefit that this would provide to the citizens of Montgomery County is immeasurable.”
