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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

County commission rejects pay raises for Knezovich, Haskell

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich will continue to earn less than his undersheriffs after county commissioners rejected a proposal to boost the salaries of the sheriff and prosecutor.

Knezovich and Prosecutor Larry Haskell asked Commissioner Al French to consider pay raises last year, and French agreed to introduce a proposal to boost their pay. That legislation was rejected on Tuesday in a 2-1 vote.

French said 17 of Knezovich’s employees earned more than the sheriff last year, mostly because of overtime. But his two undersheriffs have higher base pays.

“If you compare the amount of hours I put in, it’s really not right,” Knezovich said of the commission’s decision. Even if the commission had approved the boost, Knezovich still would have earned about $45,000 a year less than former Spokane police Chief Frank Straub, who was forced to resign last year.

After pay freezes during the recession, French said, the county has struggled to increase county wages to market rates.

“I thought we were on track to correct it for these two elected officials,” French said.

But commissioners Todd Mielke and Shelly O’Quinn said the county should wait to adjust salaries until early next year when the County Citizens’ Commission on Salaries is scheduled to make recommendations on new salaries for county commissioners. Earlier this month, the commission changed county law to require that the salary commission meet at least every other year.

County commissioner pay has been set at $93,000 a year since 2006.

“The issue is to get back to a regular review of salaries so we don’t have these big, long lulls and spikes,” Mielke said.

Though the salary commission only sets pay for the commissioners, by county law, the assessor, auditor, clerk and treasurer’s pay will adjust automatically to 95 percent of whatever the commissioners earn.

The sheriff’s and prosecutor’s pay, however, is not tied to any salary commission decision.

Haskell earns $158,727, an amount calculated by adding half of a superior court judge’s salary to half of a district court judge’s salary. Mielke said most prosecutors in the state are paid the same as superior court judges.

But county leaders came up with a formula in 2008 specifically for then-Prosecutor Steve Tucker, Mielke said.

“At the time, we had a prosecutor who wasn’t real actively involved in trying cases, and some would say didn’t keep as regular hours as his predecessors,” Mielke said.

Under French’s proposal, Haskell’s salary would have been the same as a superior court judge.

Currently, Knezovich’s salary is set at the average of the salaries earned by the sheriffs in Pierce, Clark, Kitsap, Snohomish, Yakima and Benton counties. Mielke said many other employees in Knezovich’s department have contracts that base their pay on a similar average.

Under French’s proposal, Knezovich would have earned 5.12 percent more than the base pay of an undersheriff. That would have taken his pay to about $135,500. French said the percentage was recommended to him by the county human resources department.

Knezovich said some sergeants in his department may earn significantly more than him in retirement because overtime pay is considered when calculating retirement pay.

The sheriff’s pay was cut by the Spokane County Commission in 1996 when it voted to freeze then-Sheriff John Goldman’s pay for the rest of his term, as well as cut it from $90,000 to $70,000 when his term expired. The new pay was less than the department’s undersheriffs and Goldman opted not to run for a second term.

“They did it out of politics in the ’90s,” Knezovich said of the commission’s decision. “All I did was ask them to straighten it out.”

Commissioners who supported the pay cut in 1996 said it was a conflict of interest for the sheriff to have pay based on his employees’ pay because of a boss’s role in negotiating union contracts. But Knezovich said that’s a false argument because county commissioners oversee union negotiations for contracts of his employees; he doesn’t.