Cuts made to a program offered by the Platte County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office have prompted complaints from members of the Platte County Bar Association.
In a letter issued at the end of January, Prosecutor Eric Zahnd called out the Platte County Commission for $600,000 in budget cuts and addressed the end of the Platte Cares diversion program for traffic offenses committed by those under 21 years of age.
“Several of you reached out to me to express your own dismay and displeasure with the Commission’s unnecessary, unannounced and unexplainable budget cuts, the vast majority of which stripped planned cost of living increases for sheriff’s deputies and assistant prosecuting attorneys,” Zahnd wrote.
Attorney David Lee Wells wrote a letter to Presiding Commissioner Scott Fricker about the commission’s decision to approve the budget with 2.5 percent cost of living (COLA) increases instead of the auditor’s proposed 5 percent COLAs. He asked commissioners to reconsider their decision.
“The Platte County program of diversion of the traffic violation for under 21-year-old offenders is being terminated by the Prosecutor’s Office because of the Platte County Commission’s Office failure to provide funding,” Wells wrote in his letter. “As a traffic lawyer I have to talk to my young client about their bad conduct. You all know just talking to young people to change their behavior is not enough.”
Fricker responded to Wells via email, stating “I suggest to you that (Zahnd) has a spending problem.”
“I appreciate your concern for the Platte County Cares program,” Fricker said. “We also believe it’s very important, so you can imagine our surprise when Mr. Zahnd decided to defund the program that we fully funded at his request. The budget for that program is $25,000, roughly 1 percent of all salaries in the prosecutor’s office. So his decision to close that program in exchange for a 1 percent increase in compensation is baffling.”
Zahnd’s six-page Jan. 30 letter was, in part, a response to statements made by Fricker in his letter to Wells.
“The increase in compensation the sheriff and I are awarding our employees (by cutting planned expenditures from other budget lines approved by the commission) is not a ‘1 percent increase,’” Zahnd wrote. “It is 5 percent, in lieu of a meager 2.5 percent ‘COLA’ imposed by the commission’s unilateral cuts from Platte County budget officer and Auditor Kevin Robinson’s statutorily-mandated balanced budget. Second, I did not ‘close’ Platte Cares. I reluctantly removed traffic offenses committed by drivers under age 21 from the program. Third, while the budget for Platte Cares ‘is $25,000 which amounts to roughly 1 percent of all salaries in the prosecutor’s office’ (because most Platte Cares expenses are paid by $300 participant fees), I felt compelled to find money for 5 percent salary increases for assistant prosecuting attorneys and other staff in my office from somewhere else in my budget, as authorized by Missouri law. I also reluctantly cut a much larger sum from our office’s ‘court costs’ budget line, which funds a variety of expenses used to try cases, including expert fees, deposition and transcript expenses, costs for obtaining prior convictions from other jurisdictions, and similar expenses.”
Zahnd went on to respond to several statements made in the two letters, including an exchange between Wells and Fricker about attorney salaries in general and what an assistant prosecutor could make at a large private law firm. The letters written by Wells, Fricker and Zahnd are available in their entirety on the Citizen’s website.
In Fricker’s response, he stated that “[a]s long as I’ve been a commissioner, Mr. Zahnd has never presented the commission with a salary survey of other county prosecuting attorneys to make his case that his staff is underpaid.”
Zahnd said this is a false statement, stating he did exactly that in 2024.
“My August 2024 memo ... answered ‘the county commission’s invitation to conduct a wage analysis and the auditor’s request to include three comparable salaries to justify a salary increase in excess of 3 percent,’” Zahnd said.
The memo, which was sent to commissioners in 2023, covered the prosecuting attorney office’s 2024 budget request. In it, Zahnd made a case for salary increases based on comparisons with other counties, noting that the office had trouble attracting and retaining assistant prosecutors and support staff. He said concerns about losing employees to the private sector were becoming more pronounced, as the office was also losing attorneys to other counties.
