State-funded attorneys in Wisconsin point to low pay, shortages as Tony Evers calls for more money
From October until last week, Sheboygan County District attorney Joel Urmanski was handling the amount of work typically assigned to six prosecutors.
That wasn’t by choice. Instead, like many other state-funded attorneys in counties across Wisconsin, Urmanski’s workload increased because assistant prosecutor positions first advertised months ago remained unfilled.
“I’ve never seen it this bad,” Urmanski said in February. “It’s just really incredible that we can’t find people right now that want to join the profession.”
Urmanski recently filled two prosecutor jobs, but others in Sheboygan County remain open. Public defenders across Wisconsin are facing similar challenges, as government wages lag behind what prospective applicants can make in the private sector. That’s leading to case backlogs, which often amount to prolonged waits in jail for defendants.
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“We’re at a crisis with public safety,” Urmanski said. “Everyone, when they think about public safety, is appropriately thinking of law enforcement. And we certainly need to have officers that can respond to 911 calls and be there for emergencies. But if there’s not enough prosecutors to review cases and appropriately charge them and handle those cases, then you’re just creating a glut where officers can respond, but then you’re not potentially getting a charge or an outcome. So, we need prosecutors.”
With the worker shortages and pay disparities in mind, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers proposed in his budget spending an additional $67 million on state-funded attorneys’ offices, largely to raise assistant district attorneys’ and assistant public defenders’ starting pay rate from $27.24 to $35 an hour.
The starting pay for those positions has increased 15% since 2012, but inflation has risen by more than twice as much in that time, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum report released Friday.
“With turnover rates and case backlogs growing, job applications falling, and salaries lagging those of other attorneys, the staffing and compensation challenges for ADAs and public defenders seem likely to remain a concern with respect to both public safety and the constitutional rights of the accused,” the report states. “State legislators may wish to consider these trends in the coming weeks as they set their budget priorities and lay out their plans for using the state’s sizable surplus.”
Evers has called for similar pay raises for state attorneys in the past, but the Republican-led Legislature lowered the proposed wage increase.
Doing the same thing again would just work as a Band-Aid rather than fix the issue, State Bar of Wisconsin President Margaret Hickey said.
“Wisconsin has the money to fully fund its justice system, so I’m not sure why they wouldn’t,” she said. “People talk about being tough on crime. Whatever side you’re on on that issue, you can’t have a justice system that works without adequate funding.”
Cases delayed
An insufficient number of experienced prosecutors, along with pandemic-related court closures, likely played a role in the increased amount of time for cases to resolve, according to the report. In 2013, the median felony case took 152 days to resolve and the median misdemeanor case took 89 days to resolve. In 2021, those took 241 and 168 days, respectively.
All the while, rapid inflation has led to increased wages in the private sector “and potentially exacerbated pay disparities with the public sector,” increasing the risk for veteran prosecutors and public defenders to leave their positions for private sector jobs keeping up with the rate of inflation, the report states.
The median pay for Wisconsin lawyers in 2021 was $115,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that year, the median pay for assistant prosecutors and public defenders was just more than $74,000, according to the report.
“A loss in experienced prosecutors and public defenders could make it more difficult to reduce that backlog of cases,” the report states.
Wisconsin public defenders with 11 to 15 years of experience make an average of $85,000 per year, compared with a nationwide average of $101,000 per year, according to the report.
Help wanted
Because of heavy workloads and underwhelming pay, retaining and recruiting public defenders have become significant issues, Wisconsin State Public Defender legislative liaison Adam Plotkin said.
“A starting rate of $27.24 an hour is simply not sufficient to attract people who have gone to four years of college, three years of law school, have significant debt, and we’re asking them to work 80- to 100-hour weeks — it just isn’t tenable,” Plotkin said.
From 2018 to 2022, the turnover rate among the public defenders who work as trial attorneys jumped from around 10% to 20.4%, the Wisconsin Policy Forum report states. Total applications for attorney positions dropped in that time, from 355 in 2018 to 168 in 2022.
The understaffing that has resulted from low wages is leading to case delays and courts having to appoint defense attorneys at counties’ expense, Plotkin said.
Evers proposed giving private attorneys working as public defenders $100 an hour for case work and $50 for travel time per hour, a lift from the current general rate of $70 and $25 per hour, respectively. That proposal would cost $10.8 million in each year of the budget.
Evers has called for a 10% tax cut for individuals earning $100,000 or less a year and married filers making $150,000 or less.
The governor’s budget proposal is all but certain to receive pushback from legislative Republicans, who have championed the need to implement a flat income tax in Wisconsin.
Evers on Tuesday also unveiled proposals to cut taxes, increase local government funding, spend more than $100 million to deal with PFAS contamination and support child care providers.
Around a third of students across Wisconsin feel sad and hopeless almost every day, according to the Office of Children’s Mental Health.
Wisconsin’s latest fiscal outlook projects the state will wrap up the current fiscal year with about half a billion dollars more than previous projections.
The two top options being discussed are adjusting the state’s income tax to benefit middle class earners or eliminating the current tax and creating a 3.25% flat tax.
Evers will unveil his formal budget request on Feb. 15. From there, the Republican-controlled budget committee will rewrite the document before sending it back to the governor.
Of the more than 4.2 million licensed drivers in Wisconsin, 770,000 had at least one OWI citation or conviction as of the end of 2021.
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