Last week, there was quite the buzz over clothing allowance requested by the prosecutor’s office. Like many, I heard our Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer had $5,000 in his budget request for a clothing allowance for his attorneys.
Steve Walton, the county’s central services director, apparently questioned the request in budget hearings and suddenly the Men’s Wearhouse story appeared, with a citizen asking the company to provide money for the suits and the company agreeing to do so.
In the dustup that followed, it was rumored that the request to Men’s Wearhouse for free suits came from the prosecutor himself, but that wasn’t the case. A subsequent clarification and story made clear it was actually a member of the commissioners’ citizens advisory group.
Last Tuesday, The Chronicle outlined in “Our Views” that it wasn’t the prosecutor, but actually Mitch Townsend, who made the request just trying to be helpful.
In defense of a clothing allowance, the prosecutor used the example of the sheriff’s office uniform allowance as the justification. Somehow, the idea that a uniform with a single purpose like deputies are required to wear and a suit that can be worn anywhere are the same rang hollow.
But the difficulty of finding, hiring and retaining quality attorneys in a competitive market didn’t.
During my law enforcement years, many young attorneys started in the prosecutor’s office and once they got some experience moved on. As sheriff I experienced the same thing at times with deputies, especially as the pool of qualified candidates shrank and other jurisdictions were able to offer more money.
So I am sympathetic with how difficult Jonathan Meyer’s job to attract the kind of attorneys he’d like really is.
Unfortunately, our ability to compete with the big cities, big counties, the state or private law firms will always be a challenge. Salary surveys are routinely done by bargaining units and unions in public agencies to justify higher pay, more benefits, etc.
The argument is they deserve more because some other similar sized county or city gets more, then other similar sized agencies use us to do the same thing, and so it goes.
The writer in “Our Views” was correct to point out that $5,000 is a drop in the bucket, but how many drops will be necessary to fill a $1.2 million dollar budget cap?
The answer is a lot, so especially in these times, the county is also correct to question the request.
Donations to public agencies isn’t new or necessarily a bad idea. I’ve read where in some places patrol cars have advertising on their cars to help cut costs. Public transit has been doing it for years. Others have privatized more of their services in an attempt to remain solvent.
So maybe in the case of the suits for the prosecutors, perhaps writing “Prosecutor” in big reflective letters on their backs (like sheriff’s uniform jackets do) and under that in small, but professional letters — “Justice-brought to you by Men’s Wearhouse” — or something similar is one way to go?
But seriously, the county’s budget problems have been getting worse for years and for many reasons that are outside the county’s control. There’s the spotted owl, state unfunded mandates, state rewrites of Washington Administrative Codes to shift costs to the county from the state, loss of timber revenues, Growth Management, crazy courts and more.
None (or very little) have to do with the form of government we have, but now we can add the drives to change through the home rule charter to the uncertainty. Spending more than they have coming in is unpopular — but so will be necessary cuts,or raising taxes.
I don’t see any popular choices except hiring a manager or changing our form of government, and once done neither may be popular either unless they can grow money on trees.
Maybe Meyer made the case for suits using attorney hiring, retention or turnover statistics and I just missed it. If he didn’t he should have. And I want to encourage “out of the box” thinking as the budget committee member tried.
That’s going to be required here, too.
But if I did my math right, and the county takes that $5,000 from Meyer, they only need to find $5,000 another 239 times to balance out.
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John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis, and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@yahoo.com.
