Shasta County DA's Office Strained Under Heavy Workload

Here are the morning’s top stories on Monday, April 21, 2025…

• The district attorney’s office in Shasta County is facing high workloads and high vacancy rates. Now there’s a battle over what’s causing this issue and how to solve it.
• Dry summer conditions have long been known to cause issues for vulnerable fish populations. A recent UC Berkeley study found dry winters can cause issues too.

High Workloads Strain The Shasta County DA’s Office

Prosecutors at the Shasta County District Attorney’s office work a lot. Brian Ziegler focuses on drug crimes. He said he probably manages hundreds of cases at any one time. “I leave anywhere between 7 and 7:30 in the morning, and even on non-trial days, I get home at 6:30, 7 o’clock at night,” he said. “So it’s about a 12-hour day for me.” Ziegler isn’t alone. The entire office is feeling the strain.

District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett said the workload is the same as counties with double the resources, and her deputies are buckling under the pressure. “We can’t solve this until we have more resources,” she said. As vacancies pile up, Bridgett says Shasta County needs to pay more to attract prosecutors who would otherwise choose higher-paying jobs in California’s urban counties. At stake is whether a rural county can afford to be tough on crime.

Bridgett herself makes almost $225,000 a year, but the lowest-paid attorneys on her staff make about a third of that, far less than what you could get at a private law firm or a district attorney’s office in the Bay Area. For some prosecutors, the low pay has real consequences. Ben Rothbaum said he can’t afford both rent and childcare. “So what we ended up having to do is we bought a manufactured home, and I essentially live in a trailer park,” Rothbaum said.

But even if Shasta County raised salaries, it might still have trouble hiring prosecutors. Bridgett said when she started at the DA’s office in 2002, she was up against hundreds of other applicants. “It was a very, very competitive process in order to get into a DA office, not just Shasta County, but anywhere in the state,” she said. Now, Bridgett said they are lucky to get one application every month. And luckier still if they manage to hire that person before they take a job somewhere else.

Dry Winter Affects State’s Fish Populations

A new study out of UC Berkeley finds that dry winters can cause issues for California’s vulnerable fish populations.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found that low water levels and delayed rains during the dry winter of 2013-2014 blocked some steelhead trout and salmon populations from their typical breeding grounds. For some fish, that meant delayed breeding or shifting the location for it elsewhere. For others, it led to their disappearance from tributaries and, in some cases, entire watersheds.

“What we’re starting to realize more and more is that particularly migratory animals that are moving between freshwater in the ocean are really vulnerable to the water levels that they encounter during those migrations,” said Stephanie Carlson, the study’s lead author and Professor of Fish Ecology at UC Berkeley. Carlson said these populations have returned to the impacted sites in the years since. That’s largely thanks to fish that were still growing at sea during the dry winter and were able to repopulate rivers the following year.