Commissioners increase assistant attorney salary to attract applicants

Gonzales County commissioners voted unanimously Monday, March 27, to increase the salary for the second assistant county attorney position up to $85,000 in an effort to try to make the position more attractive to potential applicants.

County Attorney Paul Watkins had told commissioners earlier this month his office is short not one, but two attorneys, which has put a large burden on him and his first assistant David Smith to keep up with the caseload. He has tried to fill the vacancies, but his office is “not having any response at all at the current salary levels for our third attorney.”

“We've had one application filed and one telephone call, and the conversation ends when I tell them what the maximum level salary is,” Watkins said. “As best I can tell, minimum salaries (for assistant attorneys) are somewhere in the $85,000 range and many of them are into the 90s for their starting lawyers.

“Probably what is causing the problem here is the big cities are having a hard time getting ahold of attorneys, so they've all raised their salaries. San Antonio is almost over $100,000 for entry level attorneys. I can't compete with that.”

Watkins said while his office really needs to have four attorneys, including himself, handling cases, it is imperative that they get a third person in the office as soon as possible.

“We can't work without the third; we cannot get the job done,” he said. “So I'm asking for a $10,000 addition to that salary so that I can put it out that it's $85,000 and hopefully get somebody to come in.

“The other option is to start prioritizing what cases we're going to do and neither David nor I want to do that — that's not what we are supposed to do. But, as you well know, you can't get four people's work out of two.”

Watkins said he is “not even sure that $85,000 is going to be sufficient, but I don't want to come in and ask for something that actually puts them in competition with my first assistant.” Smith is making $92,000 and there is some leeway in the budget that would allow Watkins to raise his salary to as much as $95,000 if necessary.

Watkins said his former second assistant attorney, Jessica Rabena, left Gonzales County a month ago for Hays County because they were offering her an additional $20,000 to $25,000 above the $74,000 she was making in Gonzales County and he didn’t blame her for wanting to make a bigger salary.

“We've tried everything that we can think of to find candidates and the only thing I can do is ask you to fund (the position) at a level that gives me at least a chance to hire somebody to come to work for us,” 

Watkins said he has advertised the second assistant position on the Texas District and County Attorneys Association website as he has in the past, but “we didn’t get anybody from that website and that’s where we’ve always gotten our candidates.”

“We put it on the bulletin boards on that internet for every single law school in Texas,” Watkins added. “That was done three weeks ago and we have not had a single application yet.”

Watkins added that in the next budget cycle, he’ll have to do something about Smith’s salary because “he's already had offers making a lot more than we're paying him.’
“I think some of it is a loyalty issue and some of it is he likes working here. It's a lot slower than working in a big city. He's done that before, but he's still at the very low end for first assistants.”