Transcription
I'm going to move to to the public defender. I was concerned about the comment that was made earlier about the kinds of cuts that are happening. I want to make sure that you have what you need in order for our lawyers to be able to carry out the work in time and not have folks sitting in in our jails um because that's an expensive place for them to sit. And aside from that, I want them defended. How do you forecast making up for any of the reductions? What what's the impact?
I'll try and be brief, but try and answer what I think is kind of a complex question. And I know I've spent a lot of time with the CEO, the COO, and other criminal justice stakeholders discussing the the kind of ecosystem of public safety world. what's the right balance so that that ecosystem is working in a healthy way.
This conversation needs to have our board involved. You're appointed by the board and we are making these kinds of decisions playing catchup.
Absolutely. And that and ideally what I would do today is help contribute to that conversation and to you all collectively. 10 positions are being eliminated from the public defender office. Five of them are attorney positions. Three of them are dedicated to postconviction services. One of those postconviction services was the single attorney doing postconviction services at our alternate defender office. The elimination of that position means that work in our alternate defender office will be redistributed to the other attorneys in the office. Basically, additional case load.
The two other attorneys that were originally funded by the PDP grant, the public defender program grant were postconviction services in our office, which is really the re-sentencing of people who may have been unjustly sentenced in the past. One of those positions was associated with our racial justice act, our retro racial justice act. And the reason we had invested in a point person for that is there's a lot of expense. It's a statistical analysis of whether people were getting disproportionate sentences, charges, or convictions. We will no longer have that dedicated position. That work will continue, but again be redistributed among our current staff. And then we had a parallegal who was helping us with that work. Those were the four positions that were eliminated or were being funded specifically by that grant.
The remaining six positions, two positions are attorneys. One is our juvenile, one of our juvenile justice attorneys. The other position is an immigration attorney. We currently have two immigration attorneys and we have some special funding where we've tried to support our immigration attorneys through the emergency grant that was was created by the county last January. That money has been expended, but we have committed to keeping that individual there until May.
Systemically, what this represents is brown and black people in in our carceral system staying there longer. maybe not having the kind of defense that they should have. It really concerns me. I'm hoping that we can have a bit of a study session in our public defender and I don't know if it could extend to probation, our justice system that we have because the public defender what if you don't have the resources resources that you need, you're going to impact the uh incarceration rate, right? And if we get our incarceration rate gets impacted, it's a whole cycle, right? And then behavioral health is somewhere in there. Can we get a study session that involves some of the systems that uh are peripheral to the public defender? I know that you provided programmatic and service level impact to the finance department. That wasn't reflected in the midyear report. Is there a pathway or something in process for a discussion on on how you we are going to solve for the everinccreasing workloads and resulting retention challenges?
I think we continue continue to be in conversation with uh the the county administration in.
Has to include us in developing and we would we would happily come and discuss. We certainly can share in particular the information relevant to the the midyear decisions. We are preparing and and will welcome a conversation about how this um plays in tandem with our our fiscal 2627 uh proposals. Certainly we would welcome that that conversation.
Thank you. And your preference is full board as opposed to PSJC.
Oh, absolutely. Full board. President Lee, I would ask if you're open to finding a an existing board meeting that that can that that item can be agendaized into.
I would suggest maybe in the April time frame prior to budget.
Yes, that works for me. I'm happy to add it.
So, they the ask us to have a study session on the public defenders um budget impacts?
Yes.
Yeah. So, does that mean we hold off on the deletion of the 10 codes today?
I want to clarify these positions are all currently vacant uh positions. So from a service standpoint, I just wanted to make sure that that was clear. I also wanted to make sure that um the board also was clear that there is no current appropriation available to fill the positions because of the expiration of the grant. So they will not that's why I describe these as basically in the form of the kind of things that the board would see in a normal mid-year budget. This is really a reflection of the kind of actions that we normally take at a midyear related to things like expiring grants.
I'm comfortable maintaining the motion given the fact that they are empty and given the fact that we have the authority anytime we're on the deis as a board to make changes. I think this makes sense today and where we are and what we're trying to accomplish.
I'm fine with the study session. I think I think that's that's important. Um, I am very uncomfortable with the deletion of a juvenile justice attorney and an immigration attorney. Yeah.
The the positions are vacant and we do have to course correct and rightsize a budget and I hear you supervisor that we do have the authority to add those positions back should that be the prerogative of this board through a vote.
I'm sure you know that those are very important areas of work for me as well. What I'm very worried about our doing is looking at these positions without seeing everything. There's so many positions that I want to say, "Oh, but not this." And let's save this. And what I would like to do is literally have the whole menu in front of me so that I can understand, oh, if we save these, that means we have to give up something here. If we go peacemeal in this way and save the things that we like and the humans department is high on my list of of work that I want to continue. I'm afraid that we're going to dig ourselves into a hole that is going to be that much harder to balance in June because we'll have already predetermined of all the important things. These are really really the most important and I just I don't know what the whole menu is.
But I'm not comfortable today advocating for any particular position, especially an unfilled one without having everything in front of me. I think my reservations don't conflict with that. I I'm not comfortable with these positions being deleted. Like I said, juvenile justice and immigration attorney in light of what's happening in the world and the amount of investments that have already been made on these fronts, but I'm not going to add uh a friendly amendment to the motion to carve out these positions at this time because they have we have a study session coming up and we do have the authority and the prerogative to add these back should that study session yield that type of measure. I think we need to rightsize the efforts from the public defenders office because there is no one else. No one else. If we if we reduce and I'm sorry Paul uh cover your ears but if we reduce staffing at one hospital or one specialty another of our hospital systems can take it up that there's nobody else. There's nobody else. So you're you have a very unique service to our community. Brown and black uh unfortunately uh people are overpoliced, continue to be overpoliced and end up in your in the system that you are um trying to manage. And so I'd like to just encourage you to continue to have conversations with the board. Um, while I understand the the county executive is the lead of our county, we appoint you and we need to have the the conversations directly with us. The county executive does not make those decisions. We do. And so and and for the rest of the appointees, I would say the same thing. Otherwise, we'll be having these conversations very late in the game here on the DIS. One issue that continues to be front of mind for for us, I think, as an organization and for me as the department head is really thinking about that balance between us and the district attorney. You're never going to hear me walk in and say the district attorney's office shouldn't be properly resourced or somehow personnel should be removed from their office and added to ours. But that balance is a concern and disparity or parody between the offices that appear to be diverging is really something that I do plan to uplift for the office. We know for instance that the district attorney office hired 10 district attorneys within the last 30 days and I simultaneously I'm eliminating 10 positions from my office and that's the type of conversation I think you know we would we would welcome engaging.