Council 6-23-2026 [89:28-94:30]

There I can pass it down. Yeah. Okay. All right. All the way down. Everybody got one? One more. Yep. I can make you a little shit. No, but I've got plenty. Good evening, council. I was, I did have a longer presentation. There's enough heckling going on in the room about how my graphs look. Thanks, Jeff. Jeff. Sheriff Day once learned how to talk longer. Come on. But I do that. I'll make this relatively short. This is worth the end of four years that I've been the chief public defender in Lawrence County. And when I came standing in this room with Jeff and Rick and Janie and Julie. I know Julie and Julie. It was a hot room with a lot of skepticism on whether the public defender's agency needed to be or whether we should go to a full contract system. And I asked for a year to show what we could do with different management. And if I could prove the value to you. And we've now gone through four years. So I have some good data to show you. The graph here, as you know, we went through a reorganization. The first year, 2022, we were over budget. There had been some pretty sizable budget cuts that occurred. And the expenses because of contract services were out of hand. Contract services at that point were $90 an hour. This year they go up to $120 an hour. They presently are 110. So getting out of a contract services model and into an internal, internalized staff model was something that I felt would be a wise economic decision for the county. It was a gamble. Because as Sam said, you have to then keep your employees. You can't be training up the employees. You can't be spending other expenses on employees. You have to really work on managing your employees to keep them. That's been a goal that I've had in the background that I don't often come and talk about. But when I was building my team in 2022 and 2023, I was looking for people that were dedicated to the cause. That were of high character. That were going to be good leaders. And I've just been blessed with the team that I've got. Because I haven't had any attrition in that time for my full-time attorney staff. With different increases that happened, whether they be raises that were given out at the county, or an adjustment to kind of moderate what was happening. You'll see that my budget went up for a couple years and then I was able to start constraining it and my budget went down. The top line you see there is the total adopted appropriation. The second line is what the actual expenses were for the agency. So immediately after my first year, I started coming in under budget every year. That was one of the things that I was told is don't come back in for additional. I was told that. And I haven't. And don't go over budget if you can help it. And then I started constraining my budget. But the bottom two lines are the lines that I think are really important for you to look at because these are the lines that really impact taxpayers. So the third line from the top, I think it's purple, but I'm color blind. I'm reading that it's purking. Okay. That is the actual cost to the county of the agency. And then the line below that is the reimbursement numbers. And you'll notice that the reimbursement number line is going up and the cost to the county line is staying steady. And if anybody can tell you that their cost to the county is staying steady with inflation, that means they're cutting into their soft budget, their operating expenses. And because those things are going up, which is what I've had to do. But this was a, I want to be brief. This is just a picture of the four years and how this plan worked. If you were using a contract model, you would have seen a lot of variation. Some years you would have been paying a lot of people at $120 an hour or right out of 110. And we've been able to keep it steady, predictable. Not have to come in for additional. It's not have to cause the stress on the council trying to figure out, well where is this money? How much is out there? You know, I remember disgusting. Janeie quite a bit when I would talk about the rabbit inside of a snake.