HOLLIDAYSBURG — Blair County and its newest employee union have signed their first labor contract increasing the starting salary for full-time assistant district attorneys and assistant public defenders from $35,000 to $45,000 annually.

The contract also provides raises to adjust annual salaries of experienced attorneys to amounts higher than $45,000, based on a tiered pay scale being introduced with the contract effective Sept. 16.

“Even though going to $45,000 may sound like a big raise, it’s still a very low starting salary for a beginning attorney,” said Assistant Public Defender Julia Burke, who was on the union negotiating team.

“The starting salary of $45,000 is where it should have been all along,” Commissioner Terry Tomassetti said shortly after the weekly commissioners meeting where he voted in favor of the agreement. “That was my goal, to get them to $45,000.”

While working on the 2019 budget a year ago, commissioners heard requests for higher salaries on behalf of the assistant district attorneys and public defenders. Both offices were experiencing high turnover and their managers blamed low salaries for difficulty in hiring replacements.

Despite Tomassetti’s willingness to include higher salaries for county attorneys in the 2019 budget proposal, commissioners Bruce Erb and Ted Beam Jr. declined, saying they wanted to wait for results of an ongoing salary and job classification study.

Subsequently, county attorneys voted in April to unionize with the Service Employees International Union. Thereafter, the county had to start working on its first contract with its seventh group of unionized employees.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Human Resources Director Katherine Swigart offered a synopsis of the pending pact but no calculation of the contract’s cost to the county. Erb joined Tomassetti in supporting the proposed pact, creating two votes to allow its adoption. Beam was absent from the meeting.

The new contract, which affects 16 attorneys, reflects current employee health insurance options, sick time, vacation leave and reimbursement practices, Swigart said. It also designates a specific annual raise like other union contracts: 2.5 percent in 2020, in 2021 and in 2022.

Assistant Public Defender Justin Carpenter, who has worked about nine months for the county, attended Tuesday’s commissioners meeting to watch the vote.

“This contract will go a long way toward making the pay here commensurate with what is being paid in some other counties,” Carpenter said. “We’ve been paid below our peers … and this is going to raise salaries to levels that give people a reason to stay and work here.”

The contract also provides some recognition, Burke said, of the complex legal work being handled by the county attorneys on a daily basis.

“We are the ones dealing with the most serious issues in our community,” she said.

Tomassetti offered a similar position to explain his support for the contract.

“You need qualified litigators in both of those departments,” he said.