D.A. Raises Despite Freeze in Hiring Draw Heated Ire

The district attorney’s office recently promoted 12 senior prosecutors and handed them handsome raises totaling more than $80,000, a move that comes while other county employees have been asked to take a week off without pay.

Word of the raises was disclosed as the public defender’s office, struggling with a hiring freeze imposed by the financially strapped county, Friday laid off six attorneys. To help the county meet a $30-million budget deficit in fiscal 1992, the public defender’s office expects to lay off another six attorneys next month.

The irony of the contrast between the two legal agencies was not lost Friday on county officials or labor leaders of the 15,000 unionized employees who have been asked to take part in the voluntary time-off program to help the county out of its financial woes.

The only employee group that has refused to go along with the plan is the Deputy District Attorneys Assn.

“The D.A. has not cooperated with the county employees or with the county administration in enabling employees to take (voluntary time off),” said Kraig Peck, assistant to the director of the San Diego County Service Council, the labor union that represents about two-thirds of the county work force.

“And it’s outrageous that deputy public defenders would be laid off at time when the D.A. is granting increases,” Peck said Friday.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Carpenter, president of the association, could not be reached Friday for comment.

Last week, Assistant Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen met with representatives of various county employee labor unions, seeking support for a mandatory week off without pay, but was rebuffed.

“The employees are very angry,” Janssen said Friday, in part because of the deputy D.A.s’ stance.

The contrast between the two legal agencies can be traced to a case of timing. Both offices were budgeted the funds they asked for--the district attorney for promotions and the public defender for the new lawyers. The district attorney’s promotions were requested and approved last November. The next month the county called a hiring freeze. That left the public defender frozen--unable to use the money it was promised.

“We had in the mill the request from the D.A. for his promotions and processed it before we ever got to the permanent freeze,” Janssen said. “In any situation where you do something mid-stream, you’re going to have different people treated differently.”

Despite “comprehensive, long discussions” with officials from the public defender’s office and other county departments, “who are all experiencing pressure to get the job done, we decided we could not support the filling of the positions.”

“We don’t print money,” Janssen said.

Steve Casey, a spokesman for Dist. Atty. Edwin L. Miller Jr., said Friday that the lawyers who received promotions--all 12 to the top grade of the civil service scale--had nothing to be ashamed of.

“Do I think our people have to sneak up on their paycheck? Absolutely not,” Casey said.

“We have had folks deserving of these promotions for some time,” Casey said. “The D.A. requested and received all bureaucratic authority necessary to promote those folks well before the county determined to impose a freeze. All they’re doing is finishing off the processing of that which has been already approved. To do otherwise would be dishonest.”

Public Defender Frank Bardsley could not be reached Friday for comment.

The county’s financial position, always precarious, has taken a beating this fiscal year because of tremendous shortfalls in anticipated revenues from sources as varied as motor vehicle license fees and sales tax receipts, county officials said.

The deficit for fiscal 1992, which ends June 30, is projected to be $30 million, officials said.

The district attorney’s office, with a fiscal 1992 budget of $48.5 million, currently employs 229 lawyers, according to county records. It is budgeted for 235 lawyers, records show.

The 12 lawyers who were promoted serve as supervisors and office managers. They handle the most complex prosecutions, including death penalty trials, Casey said.

The county pays its lawyers--at the district attorney’s, public defender’s and county counsel’s offices--according to salary grades. At their prior grade, the 12 lawyers earned from $69,097 to $83,969 a year. The promotions mean a salary of $77,792 to $94,536 annually, county officials said.

The 12 promotions were approved last Nov. 20, said Manuel Lopez, the county’s director of financial management. They took effect with the pay cycle that began Jan. 1, he said.

The average individual increase, stretched over a full year, was $13,400, said Larry Guthrie, a county financial management analyst. The total amount of the pay raise for all 12 attorneys, for the half year remaining in fiscal 1992, is $80,700, Lopez said.

On Dec. 17, the county announced an “absolute” hiring freeze--no exceptions allowed.

The public defender’s office, which is budgeted for 196 deputies, had deliberately allowed that number to shrink by attrition throughout 1991, to 184.

What the agency did, Bardsley said in an interview last week, was to hire 12 recent law school graduates last fall as hourly paid law clerks, with the expectation that they would become salaried lawyers in December, as soon as they passed the California Bar Exam.

The 12 salaries--$41,683 apiece, annually--were included in the agency’s fiscal 1992 budget of about $23 million, Bardsley said. When December arrived, and the Bar Exam brought good news, the county countered with bad: The agency would not be allowed to hire the 12 lawyers because of the hiring freeze.

Bardsley has asked repeatedly for a waiver of the freeze. But county officials have declined to provide it, saying they can’t make exceptions.

Caught in the middle are the 12 new lawyers, including Earll Pott, 28, a Harvard Law School graduate who already had bought a house in San Diego. His last day is scheduled to be March 9.

“It’s more than a little bit frustrating for me,” Pott said Friday. “I was ready to commit to this office. Now I’m left in the lurch.”

Anticipating the layoffs, the public defender’s office began declining misdemeanor cases--everything from drunk driving to petty theft--a few weeks ago in certain courts around the county, including the downtown San Diego court. Those cases will have to be farmed out to private lawyers, at $75 a case.

It is unclear how much the private bar will cost the county over the next four months, until the end of the fiscal year. Estimates range from about $200,000 to $1.3 million.

“There’s no way to know until the cases have actually been handled,” Janssen said.

“We have been talking to all our (county legal) offices about whether the process we’re using,” meaning a preference for staffing by public defender deputies, “is the least expensive one for misdemeanors,” Janssen said. “This period of time is going to give us some good information on that.”