Shasta’s District attorneys and public defenders will get bonuses this year. Will it be enough?

At last week’s budget hearing, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors voted for attorneys at the district attorney’s office, public defender’s office and county counsel’s office to receive a $10,000 retention bonus — an effort to combat staffing shortages in all three offices.

The decision came after pleas from both department heads detailing declining retention rates due to non-competitive salaries and high caseloads. Both District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett and Public Defender Ashley Jones asked the board to increase attorney pay rates, and give retention bonuses to currently employed attorneys to stabilize staffing numbers. 

Specifically, Bridgett petitioned for a three-year plan where the board would agree to give prosecutors $10,000 bonuses each year. That’s not possible during budget hearings, Deputy County Executive Officer Erin Bertain said in response, noting that the board can’t allocate future funding beyond the one-year time frame laid out in the budget process. 

The same issue impacted the board’s ability to respond to Bridgett’s plea to make salary adjustments during budget hearings, though negotiations could be approved by the board during collective bargaining agreements with union representatives in future months. 

Acknowledging that the one-year bonus is only a temporary band-aid, District 2 Supervisor Allen Long spearheaded the motion to provide $10,000 retention bonuses to all attorneys, which was approved 5-0. The bonuses will be funded from existing salary savings from staffing vacancies in both offices. 

The board also granted both Bridgett and Jones’ requests to purchase Axon AI extension, a $15,000 digital evidence software that assists offices in processing law enforcement body camera footage more efficiently. 

In a statement to Shasta Scout after the meeting, Bridgett said these efforts “represent a meaningful first step” but emphasized that the bigger picture of compensation “must be addressed soon.” She said she hopes the board will consider extending retention bonuses for an additional two years as the broader issue of competitive pay increases is addressed through ongoing labor negotiations. 

Jones has not yet responded to a request for comment sent after the meeting.

“We’re actively bleeding out”: What’s going on at the DA and PD’s offices 

In her presentation to the board at last Thursday’s budget hearing, DA Bridgett outlined the struggle her office is battling. Out of 28 authorized positions, only 19 prosecutors remain. Seven prosecutors, she said, left the DA’s office this past year alone, including five over recent months.

Bridgett described the results of that shortage as a laundry list of public concerns: long case filing times, last minute trial continuances, years to get cases concluded, extra work placed on law enforcement and ultimately, many cases not being prosecuted at all. 

Last year, local law enforcement agencies submitted more than 11,700 cases to the DA’s office, Bridgett said, and of those, about 6,000 were filed with the courts. If the staffing shortage continues, each deputy district attorney would need to review more than 700 cases a year at current staffing levels, she explained. 

Bridgett announced last month that her office is responding to most recent the loss of attorneys by temporarily reducing the number of cases it files, prioritizing those that involve violent crime and other public safety threats. 

In an in-depth presentation, Bridgett compared significant differences in salaries between Shasta and Butte counties. According to Bridgett, Butte County attempted a number of strategies to find new prosecutors and keep existing ones from leaving. The county tried increasing sign-on bonuses to $30,000, but this did not result in any new hires. The only thing that worked: increasing salaries. 

Within a year of doing so, the county had filled all open prosecutor positions — three of whom came from Shasta’s own DA’s office, Bridgett said. Currently, entry-level attorneys in Butte County make about $140,000 a year — $50,000 more than in Shasta — and senior attorneys make about $40,000 more than their Shasta equivalents, she added.  

This is not the first time DA Bridgett has made a plea for higher salaries to the board. At last year’s budget hearing, Bridgett requested around $12.9 million — $1.8 million more than what Shasta County CEO David Rickert recommended — to expand and support staffing. 

Instead, all the board approved was the addition of a single legal secretary position and a job reclassification.

Bridgett was also not the only public safety department head to make such a plea. Public Defender Jones used her budget presentation last week to explain that her office is also facing a critical staffing shortage — only 17 attorneys are currently working out of 22 total authorized positions, she said.  

She described a lack of adequate experience among an already stretched-thin staff, saying having to hire less-experienced staffers adds training burdens and delays the resolution of more serious cases. Nearly half of Shasta’s public defense attorneys have less than three years of experience in the field, she said, a problem she attributed to non-competitive starting salaries compared with nearby counties.  

Understaffed and under-resourced, Jones described how the office must balance a workload that far exceeds national standards. Some attorneys are taking on caseloads that more than double national averages, she said. 

To compensate, Jones said her office has been outsourcing felony cases, costing the county more than $7 million this year alone — the highest in her department’s history. 

“If our department was a medical patient,” Jones told the board, “I would say right now we’re in the ER, and we’re actively bleeding out.”

While Bridgett and Jones see the recent funding for bonuses and AI tools as a success, in the long term, both said attorney salaries must be made more competitive in order to keep up with other counties like Butte. 

“There is still a long way to go,” Bridgett said in her statement to Shasta Scout. “Failure to address the long term solution of competitive pay will keep our community at risk.” 

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