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Nueces County attorney outlines duties, seeks staff pay alignment with prosecutors; requests one new legal secretary
Summary
County Attorney Jenny outlined the breadth of county attorney functions and urged commissioners to approve modest salary adjustments to bring staff and attorneys closer to market parity; she included one new legal-secretary position in her presentation and said her own salary request would be submitted separately.
County Attorney Jenny addressed the commissioners during the budget workshop to describe her office's workload, the emotional and operational demands on staff, and a request to align her office's pay bands with market comparators used by other prosecutor offices.
Jenny said the office performs a wide range of functions that support elected officials, department heads, law enforcement and child-protection work. She told the court the office has staffing for 11 attorney slots and currently has 10 filled; she also said the office has an urgent need for an additional legal secretary and asked the court to approve the position.
She described two salary scenarios in materials provided to the court: a parity scenario that would match attorney and staff salaries to comparable prosecutor offices, and a modest alternative that would pull back from that higher request. The county attorney said the salary packets she provided excluded a request for her own salary in the office-wide totals but that she intended to make a separate, personal request to raise her salary toward the district-judge benchmark, with the caveat that she uses a statutory supplement and redistributes a portion of it to staff.
Jenny explained that the office has retained long-serving attorneys (many with more than a decade of licensing) and that turnovers tend to occur in specific roles. She noted that some comparable positions paid by other employers and counsel in private practice make recruitment challenging. She urged commissioners to consider the personnel manual's compensable factors (personnel manual sec. 3.19) when evaluating salaries.
Commissioners asked clarifying questions about staffing counts (Jenny said the office has 20 positions total, including 10 attorneys and support staff) and about arrangements with the hospital district; Jenny said the county attorney's office provides services to the hospital district by statute and that the district reimburses the county for the work in one notable job-sharing arrangement.
The presentation contained no formal motion or vote; Jenny said she would provide any additional requested detail.
