SILVERTON, Ohio — At a public hearing Tuesday, more than 30 attorneys and staff from the Hamilton County Public Defender's Office urged county commissioners to reconsider the administrator’s 2025 budget recommendation.
The office's budget request asked for 22 new positions to achieve the following overarching goals: a reduction in the reliance of panel attorneys in the felony division, a reduction in caseload levels within the appellate and guardian ad litem division and to address attorney needs within the municipal and youth defense divisions.
However, no new positions were included in the Hamilton County administrator’s recommended budget.
Why does the Public Defender's office say more positions are needed?
“On the whole, crime is trending down,” said Angela Chang, director of the Youth Defense Division in the Public Defender Office. “What’s changed is how … the defense role is imagined.”
The office is working toward a holistic defense approach, using social services to support individuals and address the root causes of why they’re coming to court.
“Currently, our social services department doesn’t have the capacity to serve every single client,” Chang said. “We would love to get to that place.”
The office argues that connecting individuals pending trial with social services saves the county money. It estimates that since the inception of the social services division in adult court, it’s saved the county an estimated 39,000 jail bed days for $4 million.
“We really provide a public safety benefit with what we do,” she said.
What else did the office request?
The Public Defender’s Office also requested a consolidated office space. Currently, attorneys and staff are split between an office building on Court Street and Ninth Street.
At Ninth Street, they share a building with the Hamilton County Prosecutor's Office.
“It is very unfortunate that represented clients have to walk through a space where they may run into a prosecutor or an officer,” said Ben Ranz, felony trial attorney at the public budget hearing on Tuesday.
Both requests were not fulfilled in the administrator’s recommended budget. Hamilton County’s overall budget is 1.7% smaller this year, driven primarily by a reduction in sales tax revenue over certain months. Inflationary pressures are driving consumers to spend less, impacting county governments.
Why were the office's requests not fulfilled in the recommended budget?
Administrator Jeff Alutto said at the meeting that the reflected work is in no way, shape or form an indictment of the department’s work.
The 2024 budget included a 10% salary adjustment, the addition of three new felony attorneys and increased allocations in a variety of categories. Those increases came after additional staffing positions in 2023 and 2022.
He noted across-the-board reductions were not applied to the Public Defender’s Office, and that his office would like to revisit the different position increases mid-year “when we see how revenues are going.”
“This particular budget was a revenue issue,” Alutto said.
Hamilton County Commissioner Denise Driehaus said the state is supposed to reimburse the counties in the state for public defenders. However, the current reimbursement rate is 78%. (It was recently reduced from 85%, the proposed budget stated.)
Driehaus said she is advocating for the reimbursement to be increased to 100% in Columbus: “It is the number one thing on our list to advocate to the legislature for, and it has been, and we will continue to advocate for that.”
WCPO asked Wednesday whether there was a political sentiment at the statehouse for such an increase. Driehaus said she thinks “there is a bipartisan effort right now to make this happen in the next budget.
Even getting the reimbursement rate “up to 90%, that would be a huge benefit,” she said.
County commissioners will hold a final vote on the overall budget after making any changes later this month.
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