Dolan Media Newswire Story
Subject: ‘One-fourth of not enough': Public defenders in Missouri get fraction of promised stimulus funds
Pub: Missouri Lawyers Media
Author: Allison Retka
Category:
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Issue Date: 10/23/2009 Word Count: 41
‘One-fourth of not enough': Public defenders in Missouri get fraction of promised stimulus funds
by Allison Retka
Dolan Media Newswires
© Dolan Media Newswires 2009.ST. LOUIS, MO -- Close, but no cigar.
The state's public defender system will likely receive only $500,000 of the $2 million in federal recovery funds allocated to the beleaguered system by the state Legislature.
Gov. Jay Nixon's budget office released the $500,000 on Oct. 15.
Is it possible the governor will hand over the remaining $1.5 million?
"I would say it's not going to happen," said Marty Drewel, assistant director for the Missouri Division of Budget & Planning.
The news coincides with the completion of a long-term study of the Missouri Public Defender System by the Spangenberg Group of George Mason University.
According to the public defender's office, The Missouri Bar Foundation, which commissioned the study, was due to release it to the public on Thursday evening or Friday. As of press time Thursday, it had not yet been released to the public.
Last month, public defender commissioners indicated the Spangenberg Group had hit a roadblock in its study: Missouri's public defenders spend so much time on nonattorney administrative tasks that the group struggled to evaluate what the individual caseload should be.
The state's Public Defender Commissioners had remained hopeful about the $2 million in stimulus funds, even as they waited five months to find out if the money would be released. At a September meeting at the Missouri Bar conference, the commissioners hammered out details of a plan to use the money to hire temporary full-time attorneys to ease the system's caseload crisis.
Now those plans have been scrapped.
The $500,000 instead will be used to pad the system's budget for contracting private attorneys to handle conflict cases and reduce case overload. During the last Legislative session, legislators grabbed $850,000 from the fund for contract lawyers to hire 12 full-time public defenders, said Cat Kelly, deputy director of the public defender system.
The reduced stimulus dollars will supplement the fund for contract lawyers, but it won't restore it completely.
"With that much smaller number, if we still devote it to full-time contract lawyers, we're able to give relief to only a small area," Kelly said. "As opposed to [full-time temporary attorneys], who could have helped overloaded offices around the state.
"It changed the equation."
The public defender's system is grateful to receive any additional funding, said J. Marty Robinson, director of the system.
"Two million was not near enough to fix the problem anyway," Robinson said. "We now have one-fourth of not enough.
"It's not very much money to fix a very big problem."
The director of Nixon's budget office said last month the stimulus funds intended for the public defender system remained in a restricted category of state spending, which wouldn't be touched until the state's tumbling revenues improved.
"Nothing has changed with the revenues," said Drewel, the assistant director of the budget office. "It just became a priority to release the $500,000.
"We got them as much as we could and still be able to keep the budget in balance."
The public defender system is fortunate to get some of the federal budget stabilization funds, Drewel said. Federal funding for several state projects remains restricted, he said.
For example, Jackson County was expecting $500,000 in stimulus funds for ongoing renovations of the Truman Courthouse in Independence. Those funds remain restricted, Drewel said.
The federal dollars were intended to restore a portion of the county's contingency fund that Jackson County tapped in January for emergency repairs to the historic courthouse.
Like the public defender system, the county likely would embrace any spare stimulus funds, said Jeph BurroughsScanlon, a spokesman for Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders.
But if Nixon only turned over a fraction of the promised $500,000, "I would suspect that we would be interested in pursuing it again next year to try to recoup the rest of it," he said.
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