As the Pulaski County Council continues exploring potential budget cuts, the county’s judges and chief probation officer had the chance to share their cost-saving ideas Monday. Circuit Court Judge Mary Welker told council members that there’s $50,000 in the commissioners’ budget for detention of children that she doesn’t think will be needed.
“I can’t foresee deciding that we’re going to pay $300 a day out of the county budget when DCS says it’s not necessary,” she said. Similarly, Welker said she will not renew an $840-a-month contract for Westlaw online legal research, since the county can access Lexis for free.
She noted that her court is spending less on pauper counsel this year, and some new procedures she’s implementing should help going forward. “We have changed the rules for how bills get issued,” Welker explained. “I’m not going to pay any after July or September, one of the two, that are more than three months old. They’re going to have to turn them in every three months so that we don’t get hit with $7,000 and $8,000 bills at the end of the year.”
In Superior Court, Judge Crystal Brucker Kocher is requesting more money for pauper counsel next year, but expects those costs to go down after that. She’s currently trying to move her court to a contract public defender system, which she thinks will save money in the long-run. “We have been able to, with those contract attorneys, maintain four contract attorneys, and we have been able to maintain the quotas that we’re required to keep with just those four attorneys, which has been fabulous,” Kocher told council members.
But she said her public defenders are paid less than the state average. Going forward, Kocher wants to pay all of her public defenders $35,000 a year. That would be a $5,000 increase for three of them, but a decrease of almost $4,000 for the fourth. “I can tell you that the people who are doing it for me right now are essentially doing it out of a respect for the county and our court, at the level they’re doing it, because they can go to the next county over and get their benefits and more money,” she said.
She pointed out that the state reimbursements the county’s two courts received for pauper counsel more than quadrupled between 2011 and 2018. However, the misdemeanor cases that make up the bulk of Superior Court’s caseload are not currently eligible for reimbursement.
Meanwhile, Chief Probation Officer Chris Allen told council members that the state-mandated pretrial release program is saving the county $630 per day, by not requiring certain suspects to remain in the county jail.
The Pulaski County Council is exploring budget cuts as a way to help avoid a $2.7 million deficit that projected to develop over the coming years. Another round of preliminary budget discussions is set for next Monday.
