Westmoreland County agrees to pay $60K to 68-year-old who didn't get job in DA's office

Westmoreland County commissioners this week agreed to pay a $60,000 settlement to a prospective assistant district attorney who was told she was passed over because of her age.

Commissioner Ted Kopas on Friday confirmed the case involved an employment decision made this year by District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli.

“I can confirm it is a personnel situation regarding a desire of a person to become an assistant district attorney,” Kopas said.

According to an agenda item unanimously approved by the commissioners, the payment to Donna McClelland was classified as a settlement and general release. No specific litigation was referred to in official documents and no lawsuits appear to have been filed.

McClelland, 68, of Greensburg until last year worked as a law clerk for Common Pleas Judge Tim Krieger. She previously worked as an assistant public defender and as a deputy attorney general. McClelland started her legal career in the 1980s working as an assistant district attorney in Westmoreland County. Since November, she has worked as a solicitor for the Washington County Children and Youth Services agency.

McClelland declined to comment about the settlement.

She was a candidate for an assistant district attorney position but was told she was passed over because of her age, according to information obtained by TribLive.

Ziccarelli’s spokeswoman, Melanie Jones, declined to discuss details of the settlement.

“This claim involved a confidential personnel matter, and we’ve been directed not to provide any comment by our attorney. The district attorney’s office and the county followed the advice of counsel in resolving the matter,” Jones wrote in an email.

The district attorney’s office employs 21 assistant prosecutors including about a half dozen younger lawyers who have been hired during the past two years. Newly hired district attorneys earn annual salaries of nearly $65,000. The longest tenured prosecutors in the office earn more than $100,000 annually.

Commissioners signed off on an increased pay scale for prosecutors as part of a new union contract approved with the bargaining unit that represents assistant district attorneys and public defenders. Ziccarelli praised the implementation of the pay scale this year.

“Although I had no part in the ADAs contract negotiations between their union and the county, I wholeheartedly support them and their efforts to be paid salaries they deserve,” Ziccarelli said in January. “It is also my hope that we will be able to recruit and retain talent and compete with surrounding counties whose salaries have been dramatically higher than ours for quite some time.”

Ziccarelli’s salary, which is set by the state Legislature, is nearly $219,000 a year.

According to county payroll records, McClelland’s salary as a judicial law clerk in Westmoreland County was $78,183 in 2023.

Commissioners Sean Kertes and Doug Chew did not respond to requests for comment.

Kopas said the settlement was another in what has become ongoing legal issues among the county’s elected row officers and conceded the money paid to McClelland averted a potentially costlier outlay of funds.

“There was no sense in spending a bunch of money on legal fees for the inevitable. It really is about another row officer’s mistake. The commissioners are forced to settle and taxpayers are forced to pay for these,” Kopas said.

Commissioners this year paid out $20,000 to a court-appointed conservator who for three months this summer oversaw operations of the county’s Register of Wills Office after county judges stripped authority of the elected office holder who was found to have inadequately presided over the courthouse office where adoptions, wills and estates are filed and processed.

Former Register of Wills Sherry Magretti Hamilton resigned her office in September after the judges found her in contempt of court for failing to adhere to court orders that required her to meet specific deadlines and job duties to resolve staffing issues and filing backlogs that for years plagued the office.

The judges appointed Greensburg lawyer James Antoniono to serve as the de facto head of the office as Hamilton continued to pull down her nearly $90,000 annual salary. Antoniono’s tenure as conservator ended in early September after the office’s newly appointed chief deputy was sworn in as acting register of wills following Hamilton’s resignation.