County attorney lays out salary adjustments, office budget changes

County Attorney Kurt presented his officebudget to supervisors, explaining revenue sources, proposed salary adjustments and operating-line changes in his first year on the job.

Kurt explained he used peer county comparisons and said he calculated a $102,000 baseline to align with similar part-time county-attorney positions, then applied the 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment. "I assume that my salary last year should have been a 102,000," he told supervisors as he walked through the comparison spreadsheet.

Kurt said assistant county attorney Aaron Aronson "makes approximately $81,125" and proposed adjusting that line toward $85,000 to be closer to peer counties. He also recommended relatively modest $3,000 raises across other staff positions to reflect new workloads tied to video processing, storage and software transitions connected to body-worn-camera evidence management.

On operating expenses, Kurt said group insurance was not expected to rise and that he had reduced some lines (utilities/shredding now separated after rent changes). He proposed trimming rarely used juvenile court contingency lines to a token amount and asked the board to consider running a small contingency or budget amendment if needed.

Why it matters: attorney-office salaries and software expenses affect county payroll and the legal budget, and changes can have knock-on effects for the county general fund and levy-setting.

Next steps: supervisors discussed combining salary lines (Kurt and Aaron) for future clarity and asked staff to fold these asks into the FY27 budget scenarios for the work sessions later this month.