County Attorney suggests during budget meeting some changes to attorney's office

Hill County Attorney Karen Alley met with the Hill County Commission Tuesday to present this year’s budget for her office and answer questions about it, as well as propose some changes she said would help improve operations.

Alley said the third Deputy Attorney position in the office remains unfilled this year, and she is debating whether or not to turn it into an office manager position, a role she has been effectivity taking responsibility for in the past years.

“That would take some of the burden off of me, open me up to do some more case work,” she said.

She said she would get a proposal for this change to the commission.

Hill County Commissioner Mike Wendland suggested eliminating the position entirely, but Alley said, that was a bad idea.

“That office is very understaffed as it is,” she said, “and the only reason it’s working is because I work 60-70 hours a week.”

She said cases are going to start picking up again soon as the pandemic becomes more manageable and she could potentially be working even more, and filling the position with an office manager would allow somebody to take on the work she’s doing on weekends.

“It would take all of the felony work off of my desk so I could just prosecute felons, without having to do all of the secretarial work,” she said.

She also suggested that the position of human resources and personnel clerk might make more sense being under the auditor’s office umbrella.

“Does it make sense for personnel to fall under the purview of county attorney, or under the purview of auditor so they can have access to their software,” Alley said.

She said moving the position to the auditor’s office would give whoever is in the position access to more useful data and streamline their job and would help her avoid conflict of interests.

She also said having the office under the auditor’s purview would cut down on paperwork and info duplication.

“Every employee has a personnel file in the auditor’s office and the personnel office, and we really need to not have that kind of duplication of information,” Alley said.

Hill County Commissioner Diane McLean said the move might make communication between the two offices much easier, and Alley agreed.

“I really think we need to come up with a system that is more streamlined, less frustrating for employees, less frustrations for communication,” Alley said.

Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson said he would reach out to other counties and see how they handle their personnel offices to see if they had any insight about this possibility.

He said such a move certainly makes sense on a surface level.

Alley also said dependency and neglect filings are down due to COVID-19 which has affected the budget somewhat.

She also said some pending homicide cases may affect the the Professional Services Fund depending on what happens with them.

The Hill County Commission met earlier in the day with Hill County Sanitarian Clay Vincent and Hill County Sanitarian-in-Training Will Lorett to discuss their budget.

The Commission took both budgets under advisement.