This story was originally published on LincolnChronicle.org and is used with permission.
Lincoln County District Attorney Jenna Wallace took her staffing complaints directly to the public Saturday, holding two well-attended holiday town hall meetings in an attempt to put pressure on county commissioners to grant four exceptions to a hiring freeze.
While other departments have won the exceptions, Wallace said her attempts to engage county commissioners have been ignored.
Only Commissioner Casey Miller, who has also been battling with commissioners Claire Hall and now Walter Chuck and attended the town halls, is supporting her, Wallace told the gatherings in Newport and Lincoln City.
The first-term district attorney said if she doesn’t get two more deputy district attorneys – she now has four – her office will soon begin to drop charges against people accused of crimes.
The county budget has money for 10 deputy district attorneys, but all of those positions are rarely filled. Previous district attorneys have told the Lincoln Chronicle that the office needs a minimum of six to minimally function. There are currently five.
“I have never asked for more money,” Wallace said Saturday, “but just what is allocated in the office’s budget so we will have the staffing to deal with crime in Lincoln County.”
While Wallace said the town halls were not about Hall’s upcoming recall election, the sessions were scheduled two days before ballots go out in the mail. The Newport session, moderated by Kiera Morgan of the online site Oregon Coast Breaking News, included many recall organizers and supporters.
Wallace spent 40 minutes of the nearly-two hour Saturday morning session going through how the justice system is organized, how the district attorney’s office is organized and how numbers – from arrests to criminal charges – in Lincoln County compare with nearby counties.
Because of the influx of tourists, Wallace said, the total number of case filings in Lincoln County compare with non-tourist counties twice the size. There have been 1,689 misdemeanor and felony cases filed through mid-November in Benton County, one chart displayed Saturday showed, compared with 1,666 in Lincoln County. Benton County’s population is nearly twice that of Lincoln’s.
It’s not just Wallace pointing out the issue of tourism-related crime. In testimony to the 2025 Legislature, Lincoln County Sheriff Adam Shanks said 31 percent of the inmates booked into the county jail between 2019 and 2024 came from outside the area.
“Our population alone does not accurately reflect what is happening here,” Wallace said.
The district attorney said when fully staffed, her office is budgeted for 22 full-time positions, two-part-time positions and eight positions funded by grants for a total of 32. With the hiring freeze that started in May because of countywide budget shortfall, the district attorney’s office is now without 11 positions, she said, ranging from an administrative chief, four attorneys, a digital forensic analyst, detective, two support staff and two victim advocates.
Wallace’s husband, Orrin Wallace, was bumped from the detective’s position last year, moved to a legal assistant’s job and then fired by the county in June. Orrin Wallace, the DA office’s executive chief and a parole and probation supervisor in May filed a $3.3 million lawsuit against the county for wrongful dismissal and a host of other allegations.
Jenna Wallace said the shortage of prosecuting attorneys and growing caseloads could soon mean dropping charges for low-level crimes brought by the five police agencies in the county.
“The district attorney’s office needs to be staff in order to deal with the number of cases brought by local law enforcement,” she said.
Wallace said through September there has been a 24 percent increase in the number of cases and there could be 1,850 criminal cases filed by the end of the year – 200 more than 2024. There is also a backlog of 360 cases waiting review, she said.
Before a question-and-answer session with the audience, Wallace said the two sessions Saturday had nothing to do with the upcoming recall election of Hall, but born of frustration that repeated attempts with Miller to get hiring decisions put on the commission’s agenda have been rebuffed by Hall, Chuck and county counsel Kristin Yuille, who has assumed many of the county administrator’s duties the past 10 months.
Miller was the only commissioner in attendance Saturday and came to the front of the room to help answer questions and share his frustrations about getting items placed on the commission’s agenda since asked not to work in the courthouse 15 months ago.
“It’s been a while since Jenna and I have had a seat at the table,” Miller said, mentioning that all three commissioners are being investigated by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission for holding online meetings without public notice to approve hiring exceptions. “But it’s more than just the DA’s office … it’s about how the county is operating as a whole.”
It was Miller who filed the complaint to the ethics commission in order to force exposure of the exception hiring process.
Wallace said nothing will change until the county commission gets enough pressure to bring more substantive discussions, including hiring, into the open. Miller urged the audience to attend meetings or send emails to commissioners.
But Siletz Mayor Will Worman, who was sitting at the edge of the audience Saturday in Newport, told a story of how he tried calling, emailing and even mailing a handwritten letter to commissioners to get help dealing with a city problem — and never received a response.
“It’s our job to fix this,” he told the audience.
Quinton Smith is the editor of Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com