Salary increases for several district attorney positions in Carbon County that were passed on Jan. 4 will not be funded.

On Thursday, the Carbon County Board of Commissioners did not act on transferring the additional funds within the 2023 budget to cover the alternate motions for the district attorney’s office from the annual salary board meeting. Commissioners’ Chairman Wayne Nothstein made the motion to authorize the transfer but the motion died for lack of a second.

Commissioners Rocky Ahner and Chris Lukasevich have taken a hard stance on additional spending over what was deemed appropriate by the salary study and have voted against the alternate motions, as well as let motions to transfer the funds die without a second.

During the annual salary board meeting, District Attorney Michael Greek said that he had updated job descriptions and completed his own salary analysis in September, but wasn’t sure if his findings were sent to Evergreen, the company hired to study wages.

He asked that the exhibit setting the 2023 wages be accepted. The salary board did accept the motions and made several alternate motions to shift some money around on some of his office’s positions.

These included rolling back the proposed increase for the victim/witness coordinator from $20.17 per hour to $16.59 per hour; and taking the money from that change to increase the office manager salary from $17.65 per hour to $19.48 per hour; and the legal secretary II from $17.03 per hour to $18.34 per hour. This shift, Greek said, was approved by his staff before the meeting.

At that time, Ahner said he voted against the larger increases because he couldn’t justify the figures, adding that this could be readdressed in the future.

On Monday, Greek spoke out about the board’s inaction to fund the wage move.

“I’m extremely disappointed that the commissioners would utilize inventive mathematics rather than to rectify an obvious salary problem within the district attorney’s office,” he said.

In another district attorney matter, the board of commissioners approved transferring $42,534 from the district attorney full-time employee line item to the general fund contingency line item to correct a mathematical error in the adopted 2023 budget.

Lukasevich said the error was because “The (temporary part-time) County Detective position was inadvertently included in both the full-time and part-time wages line items. Since the existing detective in the Temp PT position is actually classified as part time, the position should not have been included in the full-time complement budgeted. Therefore, $42,534 was included in the full-time line item that should not have been.”

Greek said that he felt this was a “convenient mathematical error in an effort to justify not allowing raises.”