Most sheriffs scored $20k raise in spending bill
11 percent boost in pay from Legislature follows 13 percent hike in 2021
For the second time in less than three years, the Massachusetts Legislature is giving hefty raises to the state’s county sheriffs, most of whom will see a nearly $20,000 increase that will push their salaries to $191,000 a year.
State lawmakers folded raises for the state’s 14 elected sheriffs into the $3 billion spending bill they passed, and Governor Maura Healey signed, on Monday after weeks of closed-door negotiations and a dayslong standoff between Democratic leaders and House Republicans.
Its passage realizes salaries that sheriffs and some lawmakers have sought for at least four years. The sheriffs — who serve six-year terms and oversee county jails — last received a pay increase in 2021, when their salaries jumped by 13 percent. In most cases, that, too, translated into a $20,000 pay bump.
At the time, it was the first salary increase sheriffs had received in seven years, said Nicholas Cocchi, Hampden County’s sheriff and president of the Massachusetts Sheriffs’ Association. The latest raise will boost their pay by 11 percent.
“It’s a raise that’s well-deserved,” said Cocchi, noting sheriffs in the last three years both navigated their facilities through the COVID-19 pandemic and implemented several policy changes, most recently a mandate to provide free prison and jail calls for those who are incarcerated.
“It’s been 10 years, we’ve received two cost-ofliving raises,” he said of sheriffs. “That’s very reasonable.”
Sheriffs in a dozen counties, including Hampden, Suffolk, Middlesex, and Worcester, will see their salary rise to $191,000, from $171,900 cur
The majority of the state’s sheriffs will now make the same $191,000-ayear salary as the state’s district attorneys.
rently, while those on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, where sheriffs are historically paid less, will now make $150,527 and $120,846, respectively.
Healey proposed the same increases in March, and House lawmakers attached a similar proposal into its version of the spending bill it passed last month. The raises then emerged as part of the overdue deal on the spending bill, which stalled amid disagreements over a separate proposal to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s struggling emergency shelter system.
With the increases, the majority of the state’s sheriffs will now make the same $191,000-ayear salary as the state’s district attorneys. The elected prosecutors and sheriffs remain one of the last vestiges of county-wide government in many corners of the state, and sheriffs in the past have cited changes in the district attorney’s pay in arguing for their own.
“This was a chance to get them to that level,” said state Representative Carlos González, a Springfield Democrat who filed the amendment to the House plan.
Cocchi, a Ludlow Democrat, said he personally did not cite the district attorneys’ pay in lobbying this time. “My mother told me to keep my nose on my face and out of everybody’s business,” he said.
But he said he’s still pushing lawmakers to embrace wider changes to the sheriffs’ salaries, including adopting language that would automatically adjust their pay. He recommended tying changes in their salaries to that of sheriff department staff, noting that thousands of state employees are due an 8 percent raise under contracts also funded by the wide-ranging spending bill.
“If our staff gets a 1 percent raise, we should get a 1 percent raise. I think it’s fair, I think it’s fully transparent,” Cocchi said. For now, he said, “all the county officials’ [salaries] are legislatively driven. We would like to see them tied to a mechanism.”
Lawmakers have embraced a similar approach with their own pay and that of other statewide officials, which shifts every two years based on changes in salaries and wages statewide. Those automatic adjustments have proven fruitful: The salaries of the state’s top elected officials, including the House speaker and Senate president, now stand among the highest in the country.
González, the House chair of the Legislature’s public safety committee, declined to say whether he’d support a similar move for sheriffs. “Right now,” he said, “we’re recognizing their hard work, and these raises are a reflection of that. I think that’s a conversation for another day.”
Sheriffs in other states, such as Texas and Florida, make similar if not higher salaries than their Massachusetts counterparts, according to available data. In California, a sheriff is often among the best paid officials in their county. But a sheriff ’s responsibility can vary widely from state to state, where county governments can wield far greater power than they do in Massachusetts, and sheriff departments themselves can serve as law enforcement agencies with duties similar to those of a police department.
In Massachusetts, sheriffs largely supervise and run county houses of corrections. Their deputies can also serve summons, warrants, and other legal documents, or assist police with investigations, such as collecting evidence or taking photographs at crime scenes. But they also have more limited arrest powers than police do.
Massachusetts sheriffs are a group undergoing a political transition. Long politically connected in the state, the group offered a rare mix of Republican and Democratic office-holders in a state otherwise dominated by the latter. As recently as 2020, five Republicans held sheriff ’s offices.
Today, just two do: Joseph McDonald in Plymouth County and Lew Evangelidis in Worcester County. Longtime Republican sheriffs Thomas Hodgson in Bristol County and Jim Cummings in Barnstable either lost a reelection bid in 2022 or retired, with a Democrat, Donna Buckley, winning the seat Cummings had held for more than two decades.