Did the Mobile County sheriff almost overnight get a $28,000 pay cut? Apparently not, but it was a close call, and the near miss offered an unusually clear lesson in how legislation aimed at one problem can quietly detonate somewhere else.
The near-miss played out entirely on paper — no budget hearing, no commission vote, no headline until the legal department’s research turned it up. Had the arithmetic in a local act been read the other way, the county’s top law enforcement officer would have seen his salary fall by a quarter with a single paycheck.
A statute with a hidden fuse
The county’s legal department, researching a 1999 state law that addressed the inequality in compensation between rural and urban judges, noticed something that had gone unremarked for years: the sheriff’s pay in Mobile County was linked by local act to the pay of the county’s circuit judges, set at about $28,000 less.
That link was harmless as long as circuit judges here were paid well. But the 1999 legislation produced strange results.
Eleven Mobile County judges who were on the bench before Oct. 1, 2001, including District Judges Judson Wells and Mike McMaken, continued to be paid an amount equivalent to the salary they drew when their compensation combined state pay with a county supplement. Their supplemental pay was reduced by an amount equal to the 1.25 percent annual experience raise, meaning the “supplement judges” were essentially frozen until the others caught up.
Judges elected or appointed after Oct. 1, 2001, including Presiding Circuit Judge Charlie Graddick, Sarah Stewart, Robert Smith, Edmond Naman and George Hardesty, were “new” judges without supplements, receiving about $111,000 a year plus a 1.25 percent boost for each year served.
The upshot was a genuine oddity: district judges were paid considerably more than the presiding circuit judge, a difference of roughly $30,000 a year, with approximate salaries of $145,000 against $115,000.
The arrangement was nobody’s design. The 1999 law was written to smooth out the rural-urban gaps in judicial pay, and its Oct. 1, 2001 cutoff split Mobile County’s bench into two classes — veterans grandfathered at their old combined rates and newcomers on the new state schedule — with the strange result that the county’s most senior judicial office paid less than the district judgeships beneath it.
Understand the two classes and the sheriff’s problem comes into focus. The local act pegging his salary to the circuit judges’ pay did not specify which class of judge, or which era of salary — and the frozen-versus-rising split meant the “circuit judge pay” figure was suddenly a moving target with a $30,000 spread.
The sheriff caught in the machinery
Now apply the linkage. If circuit judges were paid $139,000, that is state pay plus a $28,000 county supplement, then the sheriff received $111,000. But if a circuit judge in Mobile County was paid $111,000, and the sheriff trailed by $28,000, the sheriff’s salary would drop to about $83,000.
Sheriff Sam Cochran was nearly the victim of an unintended consequence.
“It’s a matter of interpretation,” said county attorney Jay Ross. “I think our present course is for the sheriff to stay the same. After much research and review, including the interpretation of a variety of local acts, I’ve determined that the sheriff’s salary should stay the same.”
Ross said he doubted the Legislature had intended to reduce the sheriff’s pay while equalizing judicial salaries between rural and urban counties. He also acknowledged the limits of any such opinion: “Anybody can always challenge anything.”
Ross’s opinion rested on intent — the reading that the local act’s authors had pegged the sheriff’s salary to the judges’ real, supplemented compensation as it existed, not to whatever figure the 1999 restructuring happened to leave on the books. As a matter of statutory interpretation, it was defensible; as a matter of exposure, the county understood that any taxpayer or rival claimant could test it in court.
That vulnerability was the real lesson of the episode. A salary that depends on how three overlapping pieces of law — a statewide act, a local act and a judicial pay schedule — interact is a salary held together by interpretation alone.
The sheriff’s position
Cochran, who had served seven months as an appointed sheriff before winning the office, was firm.
“I have a legal opinion that it was not the intent of the Legislature to cut the sheriff’s salary,” Cochran said. “That was a statewide bill applying only to judges. I don’t expect to make anything less than what Jack Tillman was making. The salary was set. It’s been at that rate and it’s the same rate that David Evans made. It’s the same rate that I made for the seven months that I was appointed sheriff. If it is decided to cut it, I’ll take legal action because I think it’s wrong. I’m not looking for a raise in salary. I’m just looking to get paid what my predecessors got paid.”
Tillman, elected three times, and Evans, who served as interim sheriff, had both drawn the salary Cochran was seeking to preserve.
The sheriff’s argument was built on continuity rather than entitlement. He had taken the office as an appointee at the established rate, won it in his own right at the same rate, and could point to a line of predecessors — Tillman through three elections, Evans through the interim period — who had all drawn the same figure. Whatever the judicial pay schedule did after 1999, the sheriff’s office had operated at one salary, and the local act’s linkage, properly read, had never been understood to move it.
Cochran’s promise of legal action if the cut were enforced was not idle. A sheriff contesting his own salary would have standing, a live controversy and the county attorney’s contrary reading to overcome — and the certainty of a court fight that the county had every reason to avoid.
Why local acts create these tangles
Alabama’s constitution funnels an extraordinary amount of routine local business through the Legislature. Salaries for county officers are frequently set by local acts, often by tying one office’s pay to another’s rather than naming a figure that would have to be revisited. It is an efficient shortcut until the anchor moves, at which point an office no one was thinking about can lose a quarter of its salary by operation of law.
The mechanism is seductive for drafters. A flat number in a local act goes stale the moment it is passed — inflation erodes it, and every correction requires another trip to Montgomery. A linkage formula, by contrast, keeps pace automatically with the anchor office. What the drafter gains in convenience, though, is paid for in fragility: the linked office inherits every future change in the anchor’s pay, including changes nobody foresaw, like a statewide judicial equalization bill that splits a bench into two pay classes.
Mobile County’s payroll is threaded with such linkages, passed across decades by legislators who could not have anticipated one another’s work. Each act made sense in its own moment. Read together, they form a lattice in which one statute’s technical adjustment can send a shock through an office its sponsors never mentioned.
The 1999 judicial act was exactly such a statute — well-intentioned, aimed at a genuine inequity between rural and urban benches, and silent about sheriffs. But because a Mobile County local act had quietly chained the sheriff’s paycheck to the circuit judges’, the judicial bill reached into the sheriff’s office anyway, carrying with it a potential $28,000 cut.
- Potential cut: about $28,000, from roughly $111,000 to about $83,000
- Cause: A local act pegging the sheriff’s pay to circuit judges’ pay
- Trigger: A 1999 law restructuring judicial salaries and supplements
- Resolution: A county attorney’s opinion that the pay stays put
No challenge to the county attorney’s analysis was known to be pending, and the sheriff’s paycheck, for the moment, was safe.
The episode ended where most such tangles end — with an interpretation, not a fix. No local act was repealed, no linkage rewritten, no statewide bill amended to say what it meant. Mobile County’s sheriff kept his salary because the county’s lawyer read the law the way the Legislature supposedly intended it. The fuse is still there in the statutes, waiting for the next reader.
How the near-cut was discovered
The discovery came not from the sheriff’s office or the commission dais but from routine legal research. County attorneys studying the 1999 judicial compensation law to answer a routine question about the courts followed the statutes where they led — through the local acts that govern county salaries — and found the linkage that had lain dormant since it was passed.
What made the finding alarming was its arithmetic. The $28,000 differential in the local act had been calibrated in an era when the sheriff’s salary and the judges’ salary both sat at figures the drafters knew. Nobody had written “twenty-eight thousand” as a gap between two moving lines, but that is what the act created, and once the 1999 law moved the judicial line, the sheriff’s line moved with it — downward.
The legal department’s memo laid out both readings. Under one, the sheriff’s pay tracked the actual supplemented compensation of a Mobile County circuit judge as historically paid, leaving the sheriff at his long-standing $111,000. Under the other, the sheriff’s pay tracked whatever a “circuit judge in Mobile County” was paid under the post-1999 schedule — a figure the grandfathering provisions had pushed below the district judges — dropping the sheriff to about $83,000.
The difference between those readings was one paycheck a month for the county’s chief law enforcement officer, and the county had no simple way to buy certainty. A local act amendment would require a session of the Legislature; a declaratory judgment would require a court; an opinion from the attorney general would require a request and a wait. In the meantime, the county attorney’s interpretation was the only law the paycheck had.
The wider lesson in legislative side effects
The sheriff’s near-cut has become the kind of example local government attorneys tell each other, precisely because it was so ordinary. No one did anything wrong: the Legislature addressed a real inequity, the local act used a common drafting device, the sheriff accepted his salary as every predecessor had. The danger lived entirely in the interaction — the place where no drafter was looking.
Across Alabama’s 67 counties, thousands of local acts govern the pay, duties and boundaries of county offices, many of them decades old and written for economies that no longer exist. Each session adds new statewide laws that touch their subjects, and each addition carries the same unquantified risk of an unexpected intersection. Most pass without incident. Occasionally, one nearly cuts a sheriff’s salary by a quarter.
For Mobile County, the practical answer was vigilance. The legal department had caught the problem before a payroll clerk did, and the county attorney’s opinion — written, reasoned and on file — stood between the statutory text and the paycheck. Cochran kept the salary his predecessors drew, the county avoided a lawsuit it would likely have won at the price of defending it, and the statutes that produced the crisis were left exactly as they were.
And so the answer to the question the episode posed is the one that makes it worth telling: yes, the sheriff of Mobile County really could have lost $28,000 a year to a law about judges — and only a careful reading, a written opinion and the absence of anyone willing to challenge it stood between him and the cut.