We realize that many assistant public defenders are waiting to hear the final status of the public defender budget resulting from the hearing process last night. As of today, we cannot tell you how many proposed layoffs are still in the budget for our Office. We had representatives at the hearing throughout the night on Thursday and into Friday morning, and we can tell you that the public defender budget and number of proposed layoffs was in flux all night as we continued to lobby Commissioners. We can also tell you that even as the Finance Committee was readying to vote, the picture for our Office was not clear.
On behalf of those assistant public defenders that may be effected by the budget process, we called Commissioners’ offices this morning and asked the very question that assistant public defenders want the answer to- what is the definitive number of proposed layoffs in our Office as a result of the hearing last night? They told us that the number of layoffs in our Office may not be known until next week. If we receive something more definitive before the end of the day, we will post the information here.
We can state that the layoff notices that were received by some assistant public defenders this week are not indicative of the possible layoffs in the Office. Those notices can be disregarded for now. It is our understanding that if layoffs result from the budget process, assistant public defenders will be separately notified in the future.