Flathead County Attorney’s Office Reaches Full Staff Following Years of Shortage

For the first time in nearly three years, the Flathead County Attorney’s Office has reached a full staff following prolonged periods of vacancies that have left the department short-handed amid rising felony caseloads.  

Flathead County Attorney Travis Ahner said that once the new hires begin working, there will be a total of 15 prosecutors, bringing the office to the largest staff since before commissioners approved two additional positions last year.

Ahner says a change in the county’s pay matrix likely contributed to the recent recruitment of new prosecutors, which raised the ceiling for veteran prosecutors to earn higher compensation.

Historically, the pay structure was based on how long an attorney had been with the department, leaving little room for pay advancement within the office. But the pay matrix changed – without impacting the overall budget – to bring a higher wage for more experienced prosecutors.

“We are trying to keep pace with city and state jobs,” Ahner said. “We were competitive with those folks for entry level but after five or eight years – that’s when we started to fall behind. That would cause us to lose experienced folks that are skilled and knowledgeable. This is a way to spread things out so there’s some incentives and competitiveness.”

Last fiscal year, entry-level prosecutors started at an annual salary of $84,000.

In recent years, higher paying positions at the municipal and state level has caused an exodus of deputy county attorneys, who left for jobs that Ahner says pay more and demand less.

Ahner said his office didn’t see any applications for months until recently when there was suddenly a slew of interested applicants, which could also be attributed to a possible tightening of the private sector.

At its lowest point last year, the Flathead County Attorney’s Office had less than half of the needed staff, operating with three felony attorneys and one justice court attorney.

Earlier this year, there were five prosecutor vacancies coinciding with a time when three resource-intensive homicide cases were underway, which prompted Ahner to request assistance from the Montana Department of Justice in February.

Attorneys with the Prosecution Services Bureau were assigned to handle the cases of Kenneth James Floyd, who is charged with negligent homicide, Kaleb Elijah Fleck, who is charged with deliberate homicide, and Del Orrin Crawford, who was convicted of deliberate homicide in July.

Historically, the Prosecution Services Bureau assists attorney’s offices in rural counties across the state that lack the experience and resources to handle cases like homicide and sex abuse. They also step in to assist on cases that present conflicts of interest.

Ahner said he hasn’t had to request help for any additional cases, adding that the full staff will help reduce stress loads while allowing prosecutors to do their jobs more effectively. The added resources will allow attorneys to spend more time on the rising volume of felonies, which averages 400 to 500 felony cases per year. Homicide cases have quadrupled compared to 20 years ago, averaging 10 per year today compared to two per year in the mid-2000s.

“We’ve been in triage mode for a while so this will help,” Ahner said. “I don’t know if it will change caseloads because we are declining cases that we would normally prosecute that we can’t take on because we don’t have the resources. We are now able to address certain types of conduct that we couldn’t prosecute before.”

Now, prosecutors will be able to spend more time on cases as the workload gets distributed and staff will have more time for other roles like law enforcement training while the added resources also helps boost morale.

“We were very much a skeleton crew,” Ahner said.

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