Thumbnail photo: Del Norte County District Attorney Katherine Micks discusses her department's budget with the Board of Supervisors on Aug. 5. A year after he froze positions to increase salaries, Del Norte County Sheriff Garrett Scott said the vacancy rate in his department has gone from 55% in 2024 to 12.5% currently. It’s an accomplishment the Board of Supervisors commended Scott for during the second of a two-day budget workshop last week. But, while she also applauded him, District Attorney Katherine Micks said salary increases in the sheriff’s office have made it challenging for her to recruit her own investigators. “The DA investigator, that’s supposed to be kind of a promotion, right?” Micks said. “In other counties, people want to go from the sheriff’s office to the DA’s office because there’s a bump in pay and here it’s not that way at all. And so I have zero interest from local law enforcement wanting to come over because it’s not a promotion.” In addition to having vacancies in the DA’s investigations division, finding attorneys to take on the role of deputy district attorney has been difficult. As for clerical positions, Micks said she has an office manager, a senior legal clerk and two legal clerk positions. Of the two legal clerks, one position is vacant, she said. The two deputy district attorneys that are still employed fill niche positions, Micks said. One handles the DA’s domestic violence cases and the other one is dedicated to prison and juvenile prosecutions. Micks said she’s worked to ensure those attorneys are focusing on their respective assignments. “That means that Mr. Zocchi and myself have been covering all of the general crimes including misdemeanors and felonies,” she told supervisors, referring to Assistant DA Todd Zocchi. Over the past year, Micks has contracted with Nicholas Mavris, Keith Morris and George Mavris, all of whom have private practices. The DA said she’s still hiring for the three deputy DA positions. “We’ve gotten one application for deputy DA in the last six to 12 months,” she said. “That person didn’t even show up when we scheduled a Zoom interview. Clearly they weren’t really invested in coming to work here.” Micks said her office has had to get creative with investigations as well. “Jen Williamson, she was our investigative assistant,” the DA told supervisors. “We had taken her from probation and she was our investigative assistant and she just exhibited all of the attributes that would make for a good DA investigator.” The District Attorney’s office sent Williamson through the POST Academy at College of the Redwoods. When she graduated in December, she went through the field-training program with the Del Norte County Sheriff's Office. Williamson is now a full-time investigator with the DA’s office, Micks said. The DA said she remembered a time when there were four investigators in the office. Currently, the chief investigator position is vacant — retired investigator AC Field is offering his services on a contract basis, Micks said — as is the investigator assistant position. The discussion about salaries in the investigators’ division prompted District 4 Supervisor Joey Borges to ask whether they could be represented through the Del Norte Sheriff’s Employees Association so they get raises when deputy sheriffs’ wages increase. Micks said there had been an attempt in the past for investigators to join the Del Norte Sheriff's Employees Association, but the association opposed that proposal. That is no longer an issue, however, she said. “It’s my understanding they are ready, willing and able to have my two investigator positions join SEA and that would take care of the problem,” she said. According to County Administrative Officer Neal Lopez, Micks had brought forward a proposal to increase investigators’ salaries about two years ago, which the Board of Supervisors and the budget team approved. The chief investigator in the DA’s office is the equivalent to a sergeant in the DNSO, Lopez said. But the budget team struggled with the fact that the two positions are represented by different unions. A DA investigator is represented by the Del Norte County Employees Association SEIU 1021, Lopez said. “That’s been a conversation that has been ongoing for a number of years, because they are safety positions. “At the SO, you’ll see a union that has safety only. But [SEIU] has a mix of safety and miscellaneous so that muddies the water a little bit. Over the recent past year, you guys have given the sheriff’s office significant raises which have made positions fall further behind.” Salaries for investigators in the Del Norte County DA’s office are about 30% of the average base salary for investigators, Lopez said. According to the county’s salary schedule for employees represented by SEIU 1021 in the safety unit, a chief district attorney investigator’s biweekly pay starts at $2,316.73. A DA investigator I position earns a starting biweekly salary of $2,316.73. A DA investigator II earns $2,482 in the Step A position on the salary schedule, and a DA investigator III receives a biweekly pay of $2,662.49, according to the county’s salary schedule. According to the DA’s requested budget, Micks had been asking for $1.1 million to cover payroll. However, after District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey noted that the line item got reduced to $852,000, Micks said the pay for George Mavris as a contracted employee was moved to professional services. Starkey pointed out that the professional services budget was $204,000 and asked if that would be enough. She told Micks that if the DA’s payroll budget was being decreased by $300,000, its professional services line item should be increased by $300,000. Starkey also asked about a request of $200,000 in the “Professional Services – Investigator” line item of her budget. Micks said that is Fields’ contract amount. The DA also answered a question from Starkey about Pelican Bay. “If I”m fully staffed with deputy DAs, we were meeting about $400,000 in billing because I had one full time Pelican Bay prosecutor plus about a half- to a 3/4-time prosecutor,” Micks said after Starkey pointed out that reimbursement to the county for handling cases at Pelican Bay State Prison was $300,000 for the 2025-26 budget. “We’re not billing as much because I just don’t have the bodies.” Starkey’s colleague, District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard asked Lopez if there was a way to allocate more Measure R funding to the DA’s office. Approved by Del Norte voters in 2020, Measure R is a 1% sales tax that goes toward maintaining services like law enforcement, emergency dispatch, disaster response and code enforcement. Lopez said about $1.4 million in Measure R dollars have been allocated to the DA’s office for salaries and wage adjustments consistently. That allocation has been getting closer to $2 million recently, however, though Lopez said it’s cyclical. “But it’s at the Board’s discretion,” he said. “Public safety is one of the highest priorities. If more of those funds were directed to the DA’s office on a regular basis, that would be completely up to the Board and I know would be supported by the budget team as well.” Norma Williams, president of the Del Norte County Employees Association SEIU 1021, said the pay disparities related to DA investigators have shown up in raw numbers that will make up the Gallagher Report, the salary and structural analysis the county commissioned about a year ago. SEIU conducted its own salary study back in November, which showed the pay disparities in the double digits compared to the average base salary in “a lot of the positions” including the DA’s office as well as probation, Williams said. “The bottomline is your pay is abysmal,” she said. “That’s the reason why you have the vacancies you have and the reason the DA’s office has had to contract out. That should be of concern to you.” The compensation study is not yet done, but very close, according to Assistant County Administrative Officer Randy Hooper. He said the report is expected to go before the Board of Supervisors at its meetings either Aug. 26 or Sept. 9. The Board of Supervisors adopted Del Norte County’s 2025-26 recommended budget in June, giving county officials spending authority into the new fiscal year. The recommended budget is $219.367 million with a general fund budget of $45.29 million, according to a June 24 staff report from Lopez and County Auditor-Controller Clinton Schaad. After holding public workshops and a public hearing, the Board of Supervisors must adopt the 2025-26 final budget no later than Oct. 2.