New Denver District Attorney Secures Annual Raises Before Taking Office

Denver’s incoming District Attorney John Walsh will get a raise after every year of his first term in office, with the Denver City Council approving his new salary on December 23.

Walsh asked councilmembers to approve those raises before he takes office on January 14, 2025. The council ultimately agreed, voting 9-2, with councilmembers Shontel Lewis and Sarah Parady the two "no" votes.

The incoming DA asked for a 4 percent increase in salary each year he will be in office, accounting for an overall 16.99 percent increase over Walsh’s four-year term.

A state law last amended in 2024 requires salaries for district attorneys to be set right as the DA’s four-year term begins, putting Walsh — and all incoming Colorado DAs — in an awkward place, as their pay and any raises must be passed before they take office.

“It would not have been my choice to come before you for the first time asking for a salary increase, but that's what the law requires, and that's why I'm here today,” Walsh told a council committee on December 4 when the situation was first broached.

Currently, the DA’s annual salary increase starts at 1 percent and can go as high as 3 percent commensurate with the raise that career service employees in Denver receive each year. Under Walsh’s proposal, the change would have made his inaugural salary $254,609 instead of $244,816.

But Councilwoman Jamie Torres filed an amendment so Walsh will still receive a 4 percent raise annually but will keep that $244,816 salary for the inaugural year. Torres said she worked with longtime DA chief of staff Liza Willis to calculate raises other city employees had received in the last four years, finding that if Walsh didn't receive a raise in 2025 but kept the 4 percent increases for 2026, 2027 and 2028, his total increase would be a close match to increases other employees have seen.

Walsh, who ran unopposed after defeating fellow Democrat Leora Joseph in the June primary, said his proposal is needed “to make up some of the lost ground due to the substantial increase in consumer prices over the last eight years, and also ensure that the Denver District Attorney's Office and the Denver DA pay scale is commensurate with other offices in the state.”

As Walsh pointed out in his presentation, other DAs in the state with fewer employees make more than Denver's, including in the 4th Judicial District in El Paso County, where the DA makes $265,000, and in the 17th in Brighton, where the DA makes $295,000. Both of these offices have over 33 percent fewer employees than the Denver DA’s office.

Councilmembers were originally frustrated because the state legislature contributes a portion of the DA’s salary and the local government pays the rest, and the legislature hadn’t adjusted those amounts since 2010. At a December 16 council meeting, Willis clarified that in July 2026, the state's payments will increase, making Denver’s contribution smaller in the following budget years.

At the December 23 meeting, Torres said that she and Willis had accounted for the looming rise in state contributions, and that even with the increases, Denver will actually spend less on the DA's salary than it does now, thanks to the increased state contribution.

Another element of Walsh’s argument focused on the idea that the Denver DA needs to be paid at a competitive rate in order to attract the best candidates for the position. For Councilwoman Parady, that argument was not persuasive.

“I don't see why we're entertaining this at all, to be honest,” the at-large councilmember said at the December 16 council meeting when the bill was first heard. “That is more than our city public defender makes. That is far more than the state-level public defender assigned to the same judicial district makes. That's not a salary we control, but that person has 22 years of experience and makes about $180,000.”

According to Parady, no one else on the city's payroll is guaranteed an annual 4 percent raise. Though city workers received cost-of-living raises for 2025, that isn’t set in stone each year, and Parady took issue with raising the DA’s salary when the lowest-paid employee in the DA’s office makes just $44,000 per year.

“This is a feature of something that is a pet peeve of mine, coming from the law world, which is just thoughtless salary inflation for lawyers who go into work for high-end law firms, get paid by corporate clients, or who end up as prosecutors, and that doesn't carry through to public interest lawyers, to public defenders, to other people who have absolutely every bit as sterling of legal résumés but who choose to do public service from the jump.”

Others on the council seemed to buy in, however.

At the December 16 meeting, Sawyer said Denver's city department executive director salaries have not kept up with national trends. A 4 percent annual raise is appropriate for the DA, she argued, adding that she wants to move to a similar system for agency heads as well.

When Sawyer repeated the idea at the December 23 meeting, Parady agreed, saying she thinks a process to tie the DA's salary to average city employee increases or the Consumer Price Index in a given year would be a better idea. To calculate city councilmember raises, the city picks the lower of the CPI or average city raise.

"I appreciate very much councilmember Torres's work with the chief of staff of the DA's office to try to come up with a little more of a grounding for this, but I still think it's moving through way too quickly, and it's not on par with how we treat every other elected salary in the city," Parady said.