Before Jason Schmidt had been elected Chautauqua County’s District Attorney, he didn’t think he needed changes to bail reform and discovery laws.

He was just going to deal with them, he told The Post-Journal and OBSERVER during a candidate debate before he was elected. Then, he quickly found out that dealing with the state’s discovery rules wasn’t something to simply be dealt with.

Things have changed since then. Schmidt and other district attorneys around the state have lobbied hard for discovery reforms in an attempt to reverse a statewide trend of increasing dismissal of cases on a technicality. Those trends are why Gov. Kathy Hochul was right to hold the state budget up until concessions were made on the state’s discovery rules.

While we’re still waiting on legislative language to know just how much legislative Democrats gave up in their negotiations with Hochul, we can say with certainty that you, the taxpayers of Chautauqua County and every other county in New York state, are paying for Democrats’ overzealous overreach when they wrote faster discovery timelines as part of the state’s 2019 bail reform package. Hochul’s late state budget gambit isn’t likely to change that.

During their meeting in late April, Chautauqua County legislators approved creation of a new position to help with state regulations regarding discovery, unanimously creating a discovery facilitator for the District Attorney’s Office. The salary will be set between $28.50 to $37.44 an hour. That means the position will start at around $51,800 a year and potentially earn up to $66,000. Schmidt told county lawmakers they already have a discovery expediter who gathers body cam video from various county police agencies and prepares them for the defense in trials, as required by law. The existing discovery expediter will take over the new role of discovery facilitator with additional work duties.

Let’s not forget there are five grant-funded discovery expediter positions in the county Public Defender’s office at a starting pay of about $42,000 a year with no guarantee that future state funding will materialize. All told, discovery-related positions are costing taxpayers – either through state or local dollars – about $260,000 a year.

At a time when we should be looking at every government position – both jobs to be established and even existing jobs – no one in county government batted an eye creating the position in the DA’s office. That should tell you just how much the discovery system needed to be reformed as part of this year’s budget.