Wyoming lawmakers started work Tuesday to lift the upper limit on county prosecutors' salaries from $153,700 to $180,000, and give judges substantial raises.
If it becomes law, the bill now being drafted would raise Wyoming Supreme Court Justices’ salaries from $187,250 to nearly $225,000, district court judge salaries from $171,200 to almost $202,000, and circuit court judges from $153,700 to $180,000. Those figures would change over time based on economic metrics, as they’d be tethered to federal judge salaries, which have built-in escalators.
Rep. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, asked for the draft at the Joint Appropriations Committee’s meeting Tuesday in Lander.
“This is mandated. This is what government does,” said Pendergraft. “We need to do it properly.”
The conversation focused primarily on prosecutors, many of whom have lamented their elected-official salary cap for years.
Loretta Howieson Kallas, who is Uinta County Attorney and also president of the Wyoming County and Prosecuting Attorneys Association, delivered a presentation about pay disparities in different prosecutors’ offices and between the government and private sector.
The Wyoming Attorney General’s Office tends to start new hires in the $80,000-$90,000 range, and the private sector – depending on region – at $130,000-$170,000, she said.
Many county attorney offices start around $50,000-$70,000, Kallas added.
“I love what I do, and I do it for a reason that has little to do, per se, with my salary,” Kallas said. “But it does get difficult when I know there are no attorneys in my county, and I could be making four times my salary.”
The Wyoming Legislature's administrative arm, the Management Council, has directed the Appropriations Committee to undertake this pay study. But Pendergraft had voiced a need for the changes during this year's budget-planning marathon in January.
The Legislature had, through its two-year budget, sent an extra $1.5 million per year to the 21 county attorneys' offices - a move expected to send $22,000 a year extra from the state toward county attorneys' salaries and around $13,800 each year for assistant county attorneys' salaries.
But not all counties are answering that gesture by increasing county attorneys' pay, said Kallas, adding that they're likely concerned they won't be able to sustain a new, higher wage over their four-year budget terms if the state's current budget boost doesn't remain over time.
Wyoming has 23 counties but two of those, Laramie and Natrona, have district attorneys instead of dual-purpose county and prosecuting attorneys as the top prosecutor. Kallas said that's because those two counties align geographically with the judicial districts that serve them.
The state sets district attorney wages.
The Lows
Weston County has the lowest-paid prosecuting attorney at $75,000 annual salary, said Kallas. She said the county allows that prosecutor to take on private work to supplement his income, though she questioned what kind of ethical difficulties he has to juggle as a result.
Weston County is the state’s third least-populous county at 6,808 – after Niobrara County (2,365) and Hot Springs County (4,661).
The Niobrara County Attorney makes $106,798 and the Hot Springs County Attorney makes $110,000 a year, Kallas said.
These three along with the Big Horn County Attorney and the Fremont County Attorney make the lowest salaries in Wyoming, she said. The Big Horn County Attorney’s salary is $103,960 and the Fremont County Attorney’s salary is $117,600.
Fremont County generally lands around the fifth most populous in Wyoming. But it has the “fourth-highest case load as far as violent felonies particularly,” said Kallas.
Opencrime.us, which uses FBI data, ranked Fremont County’s largest city of Riverton as the most violent in the state by far, at a violent-crime rate of 74.5 per 10,000 people in 2024.
Evanston was second-highest with roughly half the violence, at 39 violent crimes per 10,000 people.
County commissioners set county attorneys’ salaries, though the state pays either $50,000 or 50% toward them, whichever is less.
The state also pays up to 50% of the assistant county attorneys’ salaries or $30,000, whichever is less – and the counties make up the rest.
While the policy rationale there may be that county attorneys do civil work for their counties but also represent the state when they prosecute crimes, Kallas said her office’s civil work is miniscule compared to its prosecutorial work.
She has a deputy who only prosecutes crimes, a deputy whose workload is only about 10% civil and most of her work is in prosecution as well, she said.
The bill draft the committee advanced unanimously on Tuesday would eliminate the “whichever is less” language so that the state would pay half of prosecutors’ wages. It would also give the Legislature oversight in approving the routine escalations of salaries the bill envisions.
Don’t Yank Our Chain
But that bill might look completely different by the time the committee is done with it, Pendergraft told Cowboy State Daily in a follow-up interview.
After the meeting there was “some discussion by some of us, that it might be better not to cross between the executive, judicial, and legislative, for a number of reasons,” he said.
The escalating salaries federal judges enjoy are tied to various economic factors. Wyoming may want to devise its own factors, Pendergraft added.
“We don’t want – basically – the feds yanking our chain,” he said. “Our formula would be built by the state; to our liking. This all remains to be hashed out. This is just our discussion.”
The Joint Appropriations Committee’s next meeting is set for Aug. 27 in Cheyenne.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
