The criminal justice system is adversarial by nature — the prosecution vs. the defense.

And the wages of the Warren County employees in those positions — the district attorney’s office and the public defender’s office — is playing out the same way in front of the county’s Salary Board.

The board previously agreed to utilize the unspent portion of the vacant assistant public defender position to increase the wages of the position in a recruiting attempt to fill the position.

That prompted District Attorney Rob Greene to explore the possibility of a raise for his employees – First Assistant District Attorney Cody Brown and and Assistant Public Defender Kord Kinney – at Monday’s meeting.

Greene initially asked for Brown’s salary to be increased in line with other first assistants in sixth-class counties and for Kinney’s wage to be increased to that of the recently increased assistant public defender.

Treasurer Denny Munksgard raised concern about making wage changes during the budget year. He questioned which counties Greene used for comparison.

“I try to get us honed in to comparable populations and budgets,” Munksgard added.

Greene said he selected counties of the same class in this region for his comparison.

Commissioner Ben Kafferlin said that both attorneys would receive a raise under the results of the salary survey the county completed.

He questioned the timing outside of the budget cycle, adding that the “only exceptions” he “would entertain” would be “a vacancy or a consolidation of positions.”

“This is more of a budgeting issue than anything else,” Commissioner Jeff Eggleston said. “I agree with the district attorney in that something should be done to address this.”

He suggested the budget process as the time to do that, though he said he appreciated Greene “advocating for his people” who “do a fantastic job.”

Greene pointed out that his assistant DA makes $8,000 less than the next assistant PD and then focused on specifically addressing that perceived discrepancy.

“I fully support law enforcement,” Kafferlin said. “I do support the district attorney’s office.”

Speaking of the assistant public defender raise, “there was of a margin there to play with, I suppose. (We) could not fill the position (and it was) becoming somewhat urgent.”

But he said he could not support the motion to increase the assistant DA’s salary.

“It’s not in the budget,” he said. “I think you should work for what you agreed to. Sometimes it seems unfair. At the same time, there was an agreement in place.”

Kafferlin said that it would be “only a few months before we start discussing this” as part of the budget. “We are going to make changes to make them more commensurate with the (wage) analysis that we did. I don’t think we can make just one change without looking at the entire system.”

The motion was subsequently tabled.