Lebanon County has spent over $112,000 since November 2025 on attorneys hired to defend its Children & Youth Services agency in an investigation launched by the district attorney’s office last fall.
Lebanon County District Attorney Pier Hess Graf announced last October her department was investigating CYS for what she called “past and ongoing instances of inaction and/or negligence on behalf of LCCYS caseworkers, which resulted in death and serious injuries to multiple children.”
A few weeks later, county commissioners formally hired at their Nov. 6 meeting the Pittsburgh law firm Tucker Arensberg to “represent the Agency and potentially staff involved with the case.”
In financial records obtained by LebTown through several Right-to-Know requests, invoices for work performed November 2025 through April 2026 reveal the county has been billed $112,580.27 over 342 billable hours by the law firm.
That amount does not include an additional approximately $600 in combined travel and copying costs billed to the county by the law firm. It also does not include any additional expenses that may be incurred by the Lebanon County District Attorney’s office as part of the investigation.
The amount owed by the county is nearly $100,000 more than what was placed by commissioners in the fiscal year 2026 county solicitor’s budget. In approving the county’s overall budget of over $113 million, commissioners put $20,000 in that department’s budget as compensation for services rendered by Tucker Arensberg.
Lebanon County administrator Jamie Wolgemuth explained why the budgeted amount for 2026 was set at $20,000.
“The budgeted amount was just a placeholder. It was at the last minute of the budget process and without knowing the scope of the fees, we did need to make an estimate,” he said. “We had to make an estimate at the time.”
Wolgemuth said the county is paying the bill as it is invoiced, and will determine later how that expenditure is covered in the current budget.
“It’s not unlike any other thing that goes over budget, and it’s gotta get covered. I mean, there isn’t a choice in the matter,” Wolgemuth said. “Overages, in the end when the dust settles, come out of reserve funds. In real time, it’s an over expenditure.”
Commission chairman Mike Kuhn echoed Wolgemuth’s statement.
“A budget is a plan and we try to stay to our budget in every circumstance and situation the best we can, but sometimes you can’t and you have to manage that process,” Kuhn said in a telephone interview. “When we have numbers that we don’t know that are firm, we make our best estimate for what we think they are going to be for the year. We don’t know the future, we don’t have a crystal ball and the budget is a plan. As a plan, there are times when we have to make modifications to it.”
When they were hired last fall, LebTown reported that through the end of 2026, the firm will bill Lebanon County at an hourly rate of $375 for attorney Barbara A. Zemlock, $350 for attorney Marisa McClellan, and $180 for paralegal Erica Dawson.
Although the invoices provided to LebTown show an increase in Zemlock’s rate to $425 starting in January 2026, that error has been caught and future invoices will be adjusted accordingly, according to Wolgemuth. In fact, April’s invoice shows Zemlock’s rate as $350 per hour instead of $375.
The original agreement also notes the hourly rates are subject to change beginning Jan. 1 of each year after 2026, and the law firm did not require the county to provide a retainer fee (a set amount of money put aside in an account and drawn down as services are rendered by the law firm).
Based on billable hours, November and December 2025 contained 36.2 and 32.7 hours, respectively, with work picking up in January with 85.7 hours billed to the county. February’s hours were 37, March contained 57, and April was the highest total of the all invoices received by LebTown at 93.4 hours.
The billed amount would be even higher if Tucker Arensberg hadn’t provided discounts totaling over $12,500. In March and April, the two months containing the highest number of billable hours, the firm lowered its final invoice by $4,584.23 and $7,927.50, respectively.
“I asked them that question, and the answer was pretty much, ‘Well, you’re a municipal government and you have to rely on taxpayers and tax revenue and we just thought we’d give you a discount,’” said Wolgemuth. “That is the sum of the answer I got. They don’t owe us a discount. They’re a for-profit firm. I guess they could have adjusted their rate, but that’s just a way of showing us that there’s a discount.”
Various tasks billed by the law firm include research, drafting, editing and review of documents, telephone conferences, and email correspondence, among others.
LebTown asked Graf several questions via email for this article and did not receive a response from her to those queries as of publication. It’s also still unclear whether the county’s DA office will file charges against Lebanon County’s CYS staff in this case, and when this investigation will end.
LebTown also asked Wolgemuth for an official comment from the county about the case and he declined to comment. Kuhn said he didn’t know anything about the case and referred questions concerning it to Graf.
“I really don’t know any details about that and I can’t make any comment about that,” Kuhn said. “It’s within the DA’s purview and she doesn’t report to us on any case she’s involved in.”
As reported by LebTown last fall, any potential charges that may be filed by Graf could be limited by an anticipated Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in a similar case from Lackawanna County.
The Lackawanna County case, which was decided in September 2025, is currently on appeal to the state’s highest judicial body.
Earlier in the Lackawanna case, the Pennsylvania Superior Court, the state’s second highest, ruled that an immunity provision in Pennsylvania’s Child Protective Services Law shielded caseworkers from endangering welfare of children charges, but not from failure to report abuse charges.
The Superior Court’s decision has been appealed to the state Supreme Court by both the Lackawanna County DA and the defendant caseworkers. As of publication, no decision has been announced in that case.
LebTown previously reported the state court could simply decline to hear the appeal, in effect making the Superior Court’s decision final.
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