Rachel Cornelius has been serving as the Waseca County attorney since being elected to the role in 2018.
Cornelius gave a presentation to the Waseca County Board of Commissioners at its June 4 meeting about the work the County Attorney’s Office does and what factors and challenges they are currently facing.
Collaboration
Cornelius started the presentation off with what the County Attorney’s office does. She explained that the office has contracts with the cities within Waseca County to provide criminal prosecution for the county.
Waseca County’s Attorney’s Office comprises of six staff members, including Cornelius, Paralegal Lori Anderson, Assistant County Attorney’s Rusty Hardeman, Amanda Pflueger, and Deja Weber, and Office Coordinator Stephanie Hayes.
Any crime that is committed in Waseca County comes to Cornelius’ office because of the contracts with the cities. Cornelius stated that this makes it easy since all of the crimes are handled in one place.
“Law enforcement likes that because they always know where they have to send reports and who they should consult with,” Cornelius said in the presentation.
Cornelius and her office also assist the county’s department heads with contract review, consulting, and advice in civil matters. Cornelius stated that the attorney’s office is required to know about a lot of things related to contract reviews and have to review a lot of documents for the various departments in the county.
While the review of the documents and the work with the department heads can take time, Cornelius said that the department heads are great to work with and that makes it better to collaborate with them.
“It’s really important that we collaborate with others because it makes all of our jobs so much easier because we need to collaborate,” said Cornelius.
The office works with the other departments within the county and its cities on matters outside of contract reviews as well, as the office talks with them about what they can do to make the criminal justice system in the county better.
Cornelius also does work outside of the country with the office having memberships in committees statewide and regional units such as the South Central Drug Investigation Unit(SCDIU).
The Waseca County Attorney’s office handles data requests for SCDIU, along with the attorney offices of Freeborn County, Steele County, and Faribault County. The role of SCDIU is investigating narcotic and violent crimes.
Cornelius was busy this spring for her work with statewide organizations such as the Minnesota County Attorneys Association, as she went over all the bills that would affect criminal law and gave feedback to the executive board.
Complicating factors
The attorney’s office has had some factors complicating increasing their workload over the past few years, with the biggest complicated factor being the increase of jury trials.
Cornelius stated that having just one jury trial in the past seemed like a lot for the office to handle, and now the office is having multiple a year with Cornelius losing count of how many they had last year.
There has also been an increase in contested hearings and appeals, which is very time consuming for the office as well.
The office has also seen an increase in violent crime, which involve cases that are time consuming and complicated.
“I’ve charged attempted murder more in the last four years than I’ve ever charged,” Cornelius said.
But one of the things that Cornelius and her office is grateful for is body cameras for law enforcement. This allows the office to have great evidence for cases.
“Before we would just have to watch a squad video or listen to some audio, and now we have body cams to review in addition to having the squad videos and things like that,” Cornelius said.
Internal challenges
The office has to deal with internal challenges as well on top of the complicating factors they have been dealing with.
Most people don’t ever think of prosecutors as having vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue, but we do,” said Cornelius.
Seeing things secondhand can be challenging to attorneys and can cuase them to get burnt out. Cornelius said that sometimes attorney offices have to change up some job duties since witnessing the evidence and handling the cases can be traumatic.
“There’s a lot of terrible things our office deals with and a lot of people don’t think about the lawyer perspective and how we see it,” said Cornelius. “We might not see it firsthand, but we see it later.”
Attorney offices around the state have been experiencing shortages in attorneys due to increase in public defender salary increases and shortage of people going to law school, but Cornelius stated that her office has not seen anybody leave yet due to salary increases.
Cornelius stated that there is about a 50% decrease in people going to law school and the lawyer shortage makes it harder for attorney offices to get jobs done properly and within the timelines they are required to meet.
Drug court and truancy court
Cornelius also talked about truancy court and drug court in her presentation, which are things that she is proud of.
Truancy court was started around the same Cornelius was elected as the county attorney after other counties in the state had very good luck with it. The program helps students attend school more, with the process and concept being very similar to drug court.
In her discussion about drug court, Cornelius talked about Lyle Sellers, who graduated from the Steele-Waseca County Drug Court in October of last year.
Sellers committed a lot of crimes in Waseca County and neighboring counties and was a known burglar. Sellers decided to make a change in his life by enrolling in drug court and he did just that. He changed his life around and graduated from the program.
Sellers told his inspirational story at the Minnesota state capital on May 7 as part of the Drug Court Month celebration. Cornelius stated that stories like Sellers’ make her proud of drug court and makes her realize that her work is important.
“It’s a great reflection of who we are,” Cornelius said about the attorney’s office and Seller’s speech at the capital.
Drug court contract amendment
The Waseca County Board of Commissioners voted to amend an existing agreement to add $13,000 to the Steele-Waseca Drug Court. The $13,000 is an addition to a grant to the drug court which was originally $160,000.
“We just heard a lot about the benefits of drug court and why it’s an important and impactful program so this is certainly something that we would request approval for and recommend for amendment,” County Administrator Michael Johnson said to the board.
The additional $13,000 will go towards drug tests. the board unanimously approved the amendment, with Commissioner De Malterer motioning to approve it while Commissioner Brad Krause seconding it.
Other action
The board also approved to a pavement rehabilitation project on County Road 64 between Minnesota State Highway 13 and County Highway 12. The county had the project targeted for 2025 but were able to advance it into this year.
The county received three bids for the project and Waseca County Public Works Director requested the council to approve Ulland Brothers Inc. for the project since they were the lowest bidder. Their bid was 4% under Kollar’s engineer estimate.
The board approved the project unanimously with a motion by Commissioner Brad Milbrath and a second by Commissioner Doug Christopherson.
“This is a good road to fix,” Milbrath said about the bituminous-surfaced road.
The project is estimated to start sometime this simmer and will take about a month.
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