Prosecutors at the District Attorney’s Office Voice Concerns over Working Conditions, Salary
Some attorneys who work for the county’s top prosecutorial office say they can’t continue to work in Shasta much longer without improvements. After stalled labor negotiations, they’re speaking out.
6.20.2025 11:30 a.m.: An earlier version of this story mislabeled the total number of funded prosecutors at the DA’s Office.
Brian Ziegler is the lone major narcotics prosecutor in Shasta County. He said he works on average 10 to 12 hours a day, and often also during weekends, because of his heavy caseload.
It’s a situation that causes him to not be able to see his family nearly as much as he’d like. Ziegler said last weekend, when he expressed surprise about a new skill his son had learned, his child answered with a rebuke saying, “Well, you’re never here.”
Ziegler, along with several other employees at Shasta County’s District Attorney’s Office, attribute their heavy caseloads and long hours to an understaffing problem, which they said is largely caused by the low salaries Shasta County provides.
For months, attorneys at the DA’s Office have been voicing concerns about their working conditions and salaries in public comments at county board meetings. Their labor negotiations behind closed doors recently stalled, and some say they’ve begun discussing the potential for a strike. The labor problem, attorneys said, not only affects their personal lives, but also has significant impacts on the community.
According to Transparent California, in 2023 the annual salary for mid-level Deputy District Attorneys in Shasta County ranged between approximately $124,000–136,000 including both pay and benefits. For context, a similar position is paid roughly the same in Tehama County; $16,000 more in nearby Placer; $17,000 more in Yuba; and $23,000 more in Mendocino.
Briona Sisneros, a Community Education Specialist at the DA’s Office, said there are currently five vacant deputy district attorney positions out of a total of 28 funded prosecutors. Two positions are currently filled with paralegals, both of which will be moving into newly created positions next month.
Nolan Weber, a deputy district attorney for violent crime, said staff vacancies can be tied to uncompetitive pay. He’s on the bargaining team that advocates for higher salaries for the attorneys at the Shasta County DA’s Office. Weber and other attorneys are organized under the United Public Employees of California (UPEC), a labor union that represents a wide range of professional employees in Shasta County. Weber said during recent labor negotiations the county board has made little compromise on its already low attorney salaries.
Negotiations have played out in parallel with District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett’s budget requests to supervisors for additional positions and resources. The board is often hesitant to OK the DA’s requests, as seen during recent budget hearings when supervisors approved an overall $700,000 budgeted increase for Bridgett but only funded one of the multiple new attorney and support positions she advocated for.
During those budget meetings, Supervisor Allen Long, a retired career police officer, was the board’s main advocate for the DA’s Office. He noted the resources and funding approved for the Sheriff’s Office and said he was concerned that support for the DA wasn’t keeping up, even though prosecution is an integral part of law enforcement.
“I think it’s a really important thing at this time to give some reinforcement and to prioritize law enforcement in this community,” Long said. “The District Attorney’s Office, let’s face it: they’re the forgotten triad. They’re the forgotten part of the triangle a lot of times because the cops get all the attention.”
Prosecutors, County at Odds over Pay
In recent bargaining sessions, Weber, the prosecutor on the bargaining team, said the county refused to make any sort of compromise to increase attorney salaries at the DA’s Office. He said the attorneys requested a salary increase rate of 9-7-5, meaning this year they’d get a 9% raise, next year 7% and the year after 5%. But the county only offered a 2-2-1 and stuck with it, despite the workers bumping down their offer to 4-4-4.
“It seems like they had a number in mind, and they were never in the business of negotiating anything other than that number,” Weber said.
The back and forth is occurring between UPEC and county administration, including the board. Weber said the county has now declared an impasse, meaning the negotiation went as far as it could go. The next stage, which will happen in a few weeks, is the mediation phase, where a neutral party will mediate discussions between the county and workers. The deputy DA’s contract expired on April 30.
Supervisor Long said he couldn’t comment directly on salary negotiations because of the board’s involvement, but that he understands the problems the DA is facing.
“I would love to have the ability to fund a lot more of our public safety resources, but it’s a real challenge,” Long said, adding that giving more funding to the DA’s Office would potentially mean cutting funds from other related areas.
“When you come to making cuts to give an agency like the District Attorney more resources, you’re limited by the departments that you’re able to make cuts in, and that’s probation, sheriff’s department and district attorney, the three departments I have no interest in cutting,” he said.
The Impact of Understaffing on the Community, and Attorneys
Shasta County is not alone when it comes to issues involving prosecutor vacancies. According to a William & Mary study, many prosecutors’ offices in the United States are in a “state of crisis,” caused by prosecutors quitting their jobs due to low pay and heavy caseloads, and a lack of applicants available to replace them.
Attorneys at the Shasta County’s DA’s Office said that because of understaffing, they’re incredibly overworked, which can lead to cases getting backed up, mistakes and an inability to fully investigate to the extent they feel is necessary to ensure justice.
These problems can then cause negative impacts on the community, they said, pointing mainly to effects on public safety.
“Without prosecutors, then public safety becomes a catch and release,” said Ben Rothbaum, a deputy district attorney who specializes in family violence cases. “Somebody commits a crime, they’re arrested by law enforcement, they’re brought to jail, but without prosecutors, who are then doing the investigation, looking at the police report, seeing what charges to file — if that piece of paper doesn’t get submitted to the court, saying this person did this thing, they get released from custody.”
The attorneys added that the delay in getting cases moved forward can sometimes cause innocent people to stay in jail for longer than they should, undermining their constitutional rights.
Weber, the deputy DA for violent crime, gave an example: if someone’s in custody and their public defender is too busy to defend them, then that person sits in jail without actually being convicted of a crime, he said, adding that “justice delayed is justice denied.”
He brought up how victims of crimes are also negatively impacted by case delays. In one case, he elaborated, a woman moved from New York with her two children to escape an abusive husband who would often come to Redding to harass her. Because of Weber’s heavy workload and other duties that had quick deadlines, he said the case sat for five months without him being able to do anything.
While the attorneys heavily emphasized harms to the community, they also shared more about how their personal lives have been hit by low pay and overwork.
Ziegler, the major narcotics prosecutor, said he was crushed when his son pointed out how often he’s away from home. Weber said his wife almost left him at one point because of how long he was at work every day. Rothbaum, the family violence attorney, said he and his wife live in a trailer park with their three kids because they can’t afford to buy a home. On top of that, Rothbaum added, he’s more than $100,000 in debt. The attorney said he had a full scholarship to a law school in San Diego but had to take out the loans for living expenses. They’re currently in forbearance, but he’s worried about when he eventually has to pay them.
“Honestly, right now, the belt is so tight, I really don’t know what I’m going to do,” Rothbaum said. “I don’t know how I’m going to make those payments.”
Weber said he believes the attorneys are reaching a breaking point, explaining that their office prosecutes more cases per attorney than any other county in California, and the low, uncompetitive pay makes it nearly impossible to hire and retain employees.
“We’re doing an excellent job, but the board of supervisors is completely failing to recognize that by not keeping up with just basic market demand,” he said.
Ian Frazer, another deputy district attorney at the DA’s Office, brought up how Supervisor Kevin Crye asked Weber during a public meeting why the office can’t just recruit people who are going to take a pay cut, simply because they love the job.
“I’m that person,” Frazer said. “I went from a large statewide firm to take this job, with a pay cut. What I am concerned about is that we cannot maintain our level of prosecutions and integrity without additional resources because we can’t recruit people, and without people, we can’t do our job.”
Ziegler added that since the county puts so much support into the Sheriff’s Office in the name of public safety, it needs to hold up this side of law enforcement.
“Law and order should be a slam dunk for any conservative county, but for this county, it seems like it’s not. It seems like it’s a lot of lip service that they pay,” Ziegler said. “They say a bunch of those things, but they don’t really follow through when it comes crunch time, and now it’s time to pay a decent wage so you can attract people to come to this county to prosecute the crimes that need to be prosecuted.”
Madison Holcomb is a recent graduate of the University of Illinois Ubana-Champaign. She’s reporting for Shasta Scout as a 2025 summer intern with support from the Nonprofit Newsroom Internship Program created by The Scripps Howard Fund and the Institute for Nonprofit News.
Do you have a correction to share? Email us: editor@shastascout.org.
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I thought the county is in debt? A lot. It needs to cut costs, and HHS can’t repay the county’s loan of 10M, and is asking for more? Get rid of HHS!
lol no
The county has offered the 2-2-1 one to everyone that works for the county, and most bargaining units are at a standstill because of their stupidity….. but as someone who works for the county not even making 20 dollars an hour, in a position that required a bachelors and experience, I can’t exactly get sad over people making 6 goddamn figures a year, just find a way to hire more, because they sure as hell aren’t living uncomfortably, most other people here are getting screwed over a lot more
County Counsel Lamour makes $245,172, which is more than the max salaries of the District Attorney ($224,676) or the Public Defender ($221,316). The size of the County Counsel’s Office is smaller than those of the District Attorney or the Public Defender.
An entry level deputy County Counsel makes $94,668, while entry level District Attorneys and Public Defenders make $86,686,
None of the lawyers in the County Counsel’s Office are complaining about low pay/heavy workloads. Why aren’t they complaining? The simple answer is they are making more money and doing less work.
(The salary information is available on the Shasta County Personnel website: https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/shasta/classspecs )
If the County is serious about public safety, these numbers make no sense. Solution: have the pricey lawyers in County Counsel start doing some of the work for the District Attorney, or at least align their salaries/work hours.
I have a feeling that Crye’s “favored” positions get a lot of pork, while the others get scraps.
Joe: this is a helpful comparison point. Thanks for pointing us to data.
They should do a citizen sales tax to get the money for raises. That is what the City of Redding is doing.
Maybe the message should be move to Los Angeles. A place where they are soft on crime.
Betty, we have a pretty hard and fast rule here about telling our fellow community members they should move away. It’s not civil.
So you would prefer those that break the law to stay in our community?
Betty: I think folks who have broken the law are just as entitled to live here as anyone else, after they serve out whatever punishment the courts have given them.
The ladies and gentlemen of the DA’s office are the cream of the crop of Shasta County. They’re not asking for anything other than being recognized and treated with respect, compensated fairly, and not having to work on weekends and nights because of the insane work load, short staff, and insufficient admin support.
The ongoing persecution of our DA and her office is glaringly obvious, persistent, and sickening. This is the Crye-Jones gang, ladies and gentlemen, who have a personal vendetta on our popularly elected and highly successful District Attorney. Bridgett’s team performs miracles with little support from the BOS. I see Crye’s strategy (and Jones before him) as a methodical destabilization of local government by harassing, blackmailing, terminating or forcing out good employees in order to backfill with compliant docile minions– that is, fully dependent cronies like the grossly overpaid County Counsel Larmour– who exist to do their master’s bidding. Together with his 2 puppets, Crye has gone Scorched Earth to wrest control from our legitimate government. The Crye-Jones Outfit and their soldati have waged a relentless war on both our DA and our Registrar of Voters over the last several years. The Crye gang’s MO? Reward Ideology and obedience over experience, integrity, and qualifications. Then comes the hostile take over of assets and personnel. Wake up, fellow constituents.
This latest move to deny our DA’s budget appeal is unconscionable. By placing public safety last, the Crye 3 are effectively setting up all allied LE agencies for failure. Ultimately, we the citizens lose. It’s on you, Chair Narcissus. Harmon and Kelstrom are just your puppets. Bad show.
Remember we have the power to vote for new Supervisors for districts 1 and 5. In just one year we can have our elections returned to the people and sane, responsible governance at the supervisor level. That is, if we keep our eyes open for the enemy within– whom I believe is currently scheming in the elections office to fix the next election with the inappropriate grin and copper hair.
Here’s the fact. This is a systemic condition here in Shasta County. It’s embarrassing that Crye asks, “what I need to know is how come our sheriff’s are happy to work for low wages but you (our prosecutors) aren’t?” Kelstorm’s answer is to compare prosecutors to a 4-year-old child dreaming in Toys R Us. Shasta County prosecutors have more education, more experience, commitment and proven track record of protecting Shasta County citizens than Crye, Kelstorm and Corky ever had or will have. The next thing you know Chriss Street will get another $40,000 to figure out our law enforcement and prosecution problem here in Shasta County. Of course, Street has a shady track record involving miss appropriation of taxpayers money in Orange County. Or maybe kelstrom will suggest that the cottonwood militia take over for our sheriffs. This article is what one example of how extreme MAGA divides and damages, and how Corky, Crye, and Kelstrom continue to fail at protecting Shasta County citizens. And people wonder why professionals won’t come to Shasta County. What an embarrassing joke. Shasta County citizens and our environment have so much to offer. Far right Extremism is not one of them.
Neither our sheriffs or our prosecutors should have to work for low wages, and Supervisor Crye should be embarrassed to publically admit that they are low!
In the meantime, former supervisor Jones is moving towards forcing Shasta County to waste money defending DA Bridgett for what has already been investigated and determined to be false accusations.
Part of the reason Jones lost this re-election bid by a landslide is his district was tired of the massive waste of money being spent defending issues like this.
So here’s the thing, it’s a double edged sword.
We got some people that want to build a jail, however you’re not going to put anyone in this jail if they are not actually found guilty when prosecuted by the law.
You still have some people who want to find everyone innocent because the government is somehow a big bad wolf.
But that’s exactly why we have public defenders.
I guess my point at the end is that you need to pay prosecutors and defenders equally well because both of their occupations take some education.
It’snot about favoring one over the other, it’s about paying decent pay to both because the law can be complex.
Grouchy, I would add that it’s important to think about balancing how much money you’re putting towards front-lines crime enforcement (RPD/Sheriff) with the money you’re paying defenders and prosecutors if you want a system with legal follow through.
There is so much to comment on, so I’ll stick to two points. First and foremost, pay your prosecutors, their demand isn’t that much and to have veteran Deputy D.A’s to try cases is paramount for public safety. Otherwise, all the good arrests and investigations are wasted when there is no adjudication.
Second point,listen to Supervisor Long and dismiss anything that Supervisor Crye says or acts on. He is part of the clown show that brings our county down and his statement to hire a prosecutor who will do the work for a lower price because he/she loves what they do is ludicrous. Every Deputy D.A. that I have interacted with absolutely believe in their profession and the overall good they are part of. But after 10,20 years they are struggling to make ends meet and they cannot afford a home, family or eventual college for their children and they have seen their partners, classmates in private practice and the rewards they reap.
Find the monies Shasta County or lament the sub standard quality of life that will overrun us in 5 years
The DA is as important as the Sheriff’s Dept., Probation Dept., the Public Defenders Office and certainly the courts. The DA needs public support. Folks complain about plea bargaining but without staffing people are offered a deal and walk with a plea to a lesser charge because the Deputy DAs have too large a work load.
I was a cop for 30 years and worked closely with a DA’s office. It isn’t fair to the citizens to not be properly represented by the DA. We enjoy one of the finest DAs offices in California and we need to support the effort for additional staff and better salaries…
Do I recall correctly that the BOS, when recruiting the current County Council, offered him a salary at the top of the scale?
I can refer you to my comment about this exact thing from earlier in the week, and point out that this is a very disappointing, one sided article. Certainly not of the quality reporting that I think we have come to expect from Shasta Scout. Bottom line is this: The DA’s office isn’t overworked—it’s overzealous, and local law enforcement is mostly to blame. Police pump out low-quality arrests and overblown charges, and instead of pushing back, the DA’s office greenlights them without question to keep the conviction machine running, and the fees coming in. More prosecutors won’t fix this—it’ll just expand a system built on speed, not justice. We need fewer DAs to force real scrutiny, prioritize serious crime, and stop wasting resources propping up sloppy, punitive policing. Way to just take the “overworked” DA’s word for it though. Sigh
Good point, how is it that little bitty Shasta County population 179,224 has so many people needing prosecution that this is the case? “Weber said he believes the attorneys are reaching a breaking point, explaining that their office prosecutes more cases per attorney than any other county in California, and the low, uncompetitive pay makes it nearly impossible to hire and retain employees.”
Veronica: Thanks for your note. We’re actually publishing a story about this quite soon. Essentially, as I understand it, LE behaves very “proactively” in Shasta County, meaning we cite or arrest high numbers of individuals for things that might not lead to a citation or arrest in a different part of the state. Those citations and arrests often then funnel through to charges by the DA, meaning a higher charging rate as well. In other words, the high rates here are at least in part due to the community’s request for enforcement against crimes, including quality of life crimes.
Can’t wait for that story! The DA’s are only “overworked” (while making 120k plus a year) because the police are so “proactive” in their enforcement of ticky tack offenses.
Hi Steve, I think you’re creating a false binary. Local law enforcement is undoubtedly moving a very substantial number of citations and arrests through the system creating a severe bottleneck when it comes to prosecution and public defense. You could argue that means we should enforce less against low level crimes and reduce the workload for everyone. Or you could argue that we should continue to cite and arrest and just hire lots more prosecutors. Regardless, this article addresses something different, whether prosecutors are paid enough for the work they do.
Frankly, the Crye, Corky, Kelstorm Cartel, and their extreme far-right coalition have been attacking the District Attorney ever since their Cottonwood Militia endorsed candidate lost the election for the DA by a huge margin, as did Hobbs and Jones. But, then again, the vote is rigged here in Shasta County according to Jones and Hobbs. When will the idiocy of the extreme far-right MAGA just let Shasta County be Safe and Sane?
They absolutely are overworked and unless you work there you really wouldn’t have any idea just how much.