CLEARFIELD – Clearfield County’s Salary Board on Tuesday voted to raise the starting salary of the first assistant district attorney.
Last week, DA Ryan Sayers reported that Leanne Nedza left her position as first assistant district attorney, Friday, Dec. 29.
Nedza has accepted a position as a lecturer of criminal justice at Penn State DuBois, and will soon begin teaching for the spring semester.
Previous to that, the board had voted to set Nedza’s salary at $64,000, but now with the vacancy, Sayers said it would revert back to the old starting salary figure of $55,000 from four years ago.
Sayers said that figure would now be less than the assistant public defender and about what other staff members make in his office. He felt starting at $60,000/annually would be more appropriate for the position.
Commissioners John A. Sobel and Dave Glass both said they had only recently learned of the situation and needed more time before they could take any official action.
Tuesday Glass said he’d spoken with Sayers and felt his request was justified, noting they didn’t want to put Sayers in a position where the assistant DAs were paid about the same salary as the first assistant DA.
“You want your first assistant to be at a higher salary than your other assistants,” said Glass. “So, given the changes we’ve made, if we bumped this back, he would be running right into that problem.”
The request was subsequently approved, 3-1, with Sobel being the lone opposing vote despite appreciating Sayers’ “advocacy for his staff.”
However, he pointed out that it’s not uncommon for attorneys to frequently go back and forth between the DA’s and public defender’s offices.
Sobel said the current assistant public defender was previously a first assistant DA for the county, “and now he’s going to make less money than someone who’s not yet the first assistant district attorney.”