Six years of Wayne County payroll records dismantle the part-time defense that keeps getting repeated.
After we reported that ADA Brendan Ellis privately represented Wayne County Coroner Edward R. Howell, the pushback landed on one word: part-time. Ellis is part-time, commenters said. Part-time government lawyers can take private clients. Here’s the statute. Case closed.
That was never the point — the coroner’s forensic findings trigger criminal prosecutions in this county, and a prosecutor privately representing the official whose findings his own office acts on is a conflict regardless of hours. But the factual claim underneath the defense was worth checking on its own.
Ellis is one of five prosecutors in a two-judge district. He handles felonies. He negotiates pleas, works with county detectives, and has prosecuted here long enough to collect a ten-year service award. The statute his defenders cited, 16 Pa. C.S. § 14301(h), permits a district attorney to keep an outside practice — but Ellis isn’t the DA, and nobody had actually checked what the county’s own records say about his hours.
So we pulled them.
What the Record Shows
Every December, the Wayne County Commissioners approve county salaries in public session. The minutes list each employee by name, title, hours, and pay. We obtained six straight years, December 2020 through December 2025.
Here’s Brendan Ellis:
| Year Approved | Status | Salary |
|---|---|---|
| December 2020 | 30 hours | $36,310.92 |
| December 2021 | 30 hours | $37,406.30 |
| December 2022 | 30 hours | $37,406.30 |
| December 2023 | 30 hours | $38,905.15 |
| December 2024 | Full time | $40,073.59 |
| December 2025 | Full time | $41,278.60 |
For four years, 30 hours. His pay didn’t move at all between 2021 and 2022. Then, sometime between December 2023 and December 2024, the county changed him to full-time.
Look at what that change was worth: $1,168.44.
If full-time means 35 hours in Wayne County, converting an honest 30-hour employee should have landed him around $45,000. At 40 hours, closer to $52,000. Ellis got $40,073. That’s not the raise of someone who started working more hours. It’s the raise of someone whose paperwork changed and whose job didn’t.
What the Salary Doesn’t Show
Forty thousand dollars for a full-time felony prosecutor looks low — until you see where the rest comes in.
Ellis bills private clients through Ellis Law Group at the same time. He also holds a second public appointment — solicitor to the Wayne County Auditor’s Office — approved unanimously by the commissioners, at $750 a year. The county number looks small because a small number sells the part-time story. The actual income runs through channels the county doesn’t report and can’t see.
That $750 auditor job is worth stopping on.
Wayne County’s elected auditors exist to examine the accounts of every county officer who touches public money — the commissioners included. When they need legal advice on whether a county dollar was spent lawfully, they call their solicitor. Their solicitor is Brendan Ellis.
So follow the loop. The commissioners set Ellis’s salary and classification. The auditors are supposed to scrutinize the commissioners. And the auditors’ lawyer is the same man whose own classification is the thing worth scrutinizing. At $750 a year, that’s not a legal fee. It’s a seat at the table. The one office equipped to question how Ellis is paid takes its legal advice from Ellis.
And His Wife Was on the Same Payroll
The 2022 and 2023 minutes carry a name the later ones drop: Jessica Ellis, ADA.
| Year | Status | Salary |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 30 hours | $34,265.08 |
| 2023 | (no hours listed) | $34,265.08 |
| 2024 | Full time | $35,285.33 |
Husband and wife. Both prosecutors. Both at 30 hours when hours were still being reported. Both flipped to full-time by December 2024. Both practicing through the same firm the whole time. The Ellis Law Group website kept soliciting clients even after Jessica’s judicial appointment.
She resigned from the DA’s office on December 24, 2025, and took the MDJ 22-3-02 bench that January. One Ellis left the prosecutor’s office; the other kept prosecuting from it. The firm that ties them together never closed.
Who Was Checking?
Nobody with the standing to.
The commissioners approved the full-time flip. These are the same commissioners who handed Ellis a ten-year service award for never turning down a case — while he tried those cases in front of his own former law partner, undisclosed — and who rubber-stamped his $750 auditor appointment. DA Howell runs the office Ellis works in, and this is the DA whose operation ran a prosecution on his father’s debt-collection timeline, documented in his own detective’s report. None of these people is an outside check on Ellis. They’re all inside the same room.
The dockets don’t help. Wayne County’s criminal dockets rarely name the individual prosecutor at all. Ellis is close to invisible on the county’s own record system. His real work — the emails, the scheduling, the calls with defense counsel — moves through a private phone line and a private server. The county doesn’t hold those records. Ellis does.
So to everyone who cited § 14301(h): the principle was fine. The facts weren’t. Ellis hasn’t been part-time since at least December 2024. The statute governs the elected DA, not his assistants. And the coroner conflict was never about his hours in the first place.
We don’t know what Ellis’s week actually looks like. We don’t know if anyone reviewed his private practice when his status changed. We know what the county wrote down.
The county wrote down full-time.
Court records cited here are public through the Pennsylvania Unified Judicial System portal at ujsportal.pacourts.us. Wayne County Commissioner minutes are public record. Corporate filings are available at corporations.pa.gov.
If you have information about this or similar cases in the Wayne County Court of Common Pleas, contact tips@poconoreview.com.