About a year after 4th Judicial District Attorney Dan May got a roughly $30,000 raise, he’s asking El Paso County for more money to pay his staff.
At a Thursday hearing on the county’s 2018 budget, May told county commissioners he is struggling to retain employees because their pay is too low.
The turnover rate among his office’s roughly 80 attorneys has reached 21 percent this year, he said. For the more than 20 investigators that work for him, turnover has soared to 34 percent.
Last year, the turnover rates for both positions hovered at about 12 percent, he said.
“Salary is the number one thing that affects my office,” he said during a presentation.
Across El Paso County departments, turnover rates among staff have inched upward in recent years, from about 9.5 percent in 2010 to about 13.8 percent through October in 2017, county chief financial officer Nicola Sapp said during the hearing.
The county Public Works’ department is losing staff members to construction companies that can pay higher salaries. Employees in the county’s Information Technology department, too, are abandoning their government careers for more lucrative jobs in the private sector; department has 74 positions, but it’s been unable to fill 15 of those, Sapp said.
The county currently has 2,715 full-time employees. Personnel costs accounted for about 62 percent of the county’s roughly $324 million 2017 budget, according to Sapp.
To read more of this story go to
