Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones is renewing her office's request for four additional assistant district attorneys as Chatham County works through its fiscal year 2023 budget. The county is tentatively set to adopt the budget on June 24.
According to the proposed county budget, the DA's office is earmarked to receive $5,322,954 for regular employees, which is less than the $5,590,662 requested but an increase over the $4,937,280 adopted in the FY22 budget.
The office is seeking a total overall budget of $9,027,417 for FY23. The proposed FY23 budget is $8,576,687 a 4% increase to the $8,245,730 allocated in the FY22 budget.
Last year Jones petitioned the county for an additional $280,000 to fund four new assistant district attorney positions. The office was granted $500,000 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding for the new positions, but has only received half the amount.
Nearly $100,000 from the initial $250,000 was used for pension benefits and insurance leaving $151,000 for two temporary ADA positions. The office allocated $81,000 to hire ADA Jeff Felser, but the second position remains vacant.
"I think that (last year), the conventional thinking was that we would use ARPA funds to pay for those four positions. In theory, I think that was a good idea, but it didn't work out that way in practice, because we found that once the tranches were divided, that we were only able to have enough money for two ADAs rather than one," Jones told members of the Chatham County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday during a budget workshop.
Several factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and shift to remote work has made the hiring and talent pool very low, Jones said.
“So, what I found in the past 16 months in my office is that people are leaving. Many of them are going back to or taking corporate offers where they can work across the nation from anywhere for twice as much money or they can work remotely. And so that has hamstrung us, because the market has become more competitive,” she said.
Court reorganization has also had an impact on the DA's office. All six of the current Superior Court judges have one lead or major crimes ADA assigned to their courtroom along with a backup ADA.
Jones said each judge has between 700 to 800 cases and are working hard to make up for time lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, which means the ADAs are constantly in court.
“It means that all of these violence prevention efforts that we have spoken about, all of the gun violence that we want to address, all of the preventative programs that we know bring better results for everyone who passes through our criminal justice system, we can't even get to those, because our ADAs are absolutely swamped,” Jones said.
If the funding for the four full-time ADAs isn’t possible, Jones implored the commission to consider other workarounds such as providing ARPA funds to hire paralegals to help with case prep work.
The county will have its first public hearing on the proposed FY23 budget on June 10. A second budget workshop is tentatively scheduled for June 17.
Katie Nussbaum is the city and county government reporter for the Savannah Morning News. Contact her at knussbaum@savannahnow.com. Twitter: KnussSMN
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Chatham County budget: District Attorney renews request for additional attorneys
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