Increases whose cases have been entrusted to us.

We are committed to providing them excellent representation.

And we do that because our constitution guarantees everyone the right to counsel when their liberty is at stake.

And we do more than that.

You know, our clients don't get to choose us.

We often meet them during some of the hardest moments of their lives.

Therefore, at our core, we value being zealous advocates.

We value to strive not only to deliver excellence in our representation of each and every client, but also to stand with our clients and the community in working to create a more just, fair, and compassionate legal system.

Our staff is made up of legal assistants, paralegals, attorneys, interns, social workers, client advocates, investigators, and an administrative services team that have committed themselves daily to being public defenders, requiring us to do this work to ensure that our clients are seen as more than just names on a docket.

We exist to remind people that our clients deserve dignity, respect, and humanity, regardless of what they look like, where they come from, or what they are charged with.

And I want to take a moment to acknowledge the great work that my team does, my staff, and to thank them for their service.

We are client-centered and committed to innovative advocacy.

We are partners with the community and engaged in systemic reform, particularly around bail and ending wealth-based detention.

We seek equal justice for some of our most vulnerable residents who often end up in jail because of the shortcomings in other systems, the lack of quality education, limited access and available resources for addiction or mental health support, and simply because they experience the childhood steeped in poverty and riddled with traumatic events.

We are committed to partnering with other criminal justice stakeholders to focus on practices that are restorative, rehabilitative in nature, and focus on re-entry.

And in short, we are dedicated to decriminalization of poverty.

Metro has consistently funded the majority of our office's budget, which enables us to operate and represent our clients, and for that we are grateful.

Our budget requests this year mainly focus on our needs related to retention and recruitment of our staff, addressing our workload, and keeping up with the resources and technology that we have to deal with day to day as we defend our clients, particularly related to technology and the uh changes to the way we store body-worn camera footage.

Um, I'm happy to talk specifically about those requests.

Um, the major issue for us is uh a request we made around parity for our lawyers.

What happens when a lawyer in my office reaches a certain level of experience, the both the state scale and and what we pay Nashville's district attorneys begins to outpace them greatly.

And so I have lawyers in my office who have been with us for a long time, but they can't earn in the same capacity, and it becomes a retention issue for me.

Within the last couple of months, our office has seen some of our experienced lawyers leave us, quite frankly, because they can't stay around with the heavy caseloads we're asking them to take on with the sometimes double and triple the recommended workload for serious felony cases and make the amount of money that they continue to make each year.

We have made strides in paying as much as we can.

We spend all of the money that we can to offer merit-based increases and give re give increases to our salaries and whenever we can, but that has not been sufficient to sustain our senior level staff, and that is where we see the largest gap.

So we have asked for a large lump sum payment to create parity for our lawyers in those areas and other staff members who are not receiving a salary that is on par with their counterparts in the DA's office or across the state as public defenders.

We have asked for a position to address our workload.

Um we have been a part, fortunately, of participating in a new workload study, and we are finding that many of our lawyers, particularly those again, who handle serious felony cases.

It was interesting to be here and hear Sheriff Hall talking about the increases to his population because we see those increases because we are the ones who are visiting with those clients in the jails.

We also see the increases and know the increases that the criminal legal system is experiencing on a day-to-day basis.

And so, in order to be able to address those increases, I have to be able to move my staff with the times.

And then we continue to create the disparities that don't allow us to provide excellent representation to our clients.

So I'll be quiet for a minute.

Colleagues, does anyone have any questions?

I knew the first hand that was gonna go up.

Uh uh public health and safety chair Evans, I'll start with you.

Do you have any questions?

Yes.

Thank you, Chair.

I have um, I guess could you give us an example when you're talking about the parity issue between like uh tenured or seasoned um attorney in your office and what that person would make if they were at the public defender or I'm sorry, the district attorney's office.

Sure.

I have done this calculation actually for all of the lawyers in my office.

So let's take a lawyer who happens to be with us tonight who has been with our office more than 20 years.

His salary on if he were in the district attorney's office right now would exceed 175,000.

And I pay him about 45,000 less than that each year.

On lawyers who have been in our office more than 10 years, um, their counterparts in the DA's office would make between 134,000 to 154,000.

Many of them I can't even pay more than 100,000.

So the disparities are pretty wide.

When I first got in this position, there was a lot of conversation in this body about parity from the DA perspective.

At the time, the parity issue was around starting salaries.

Um, and none of my comments here are are meaning to say the DAs are not to be paid what they deserve to be paid, because they are.

I'm talking about what we are not being paid right now as public defenders.

And so those conversations at that time were around how our office salaries at the time started off a little bit more.

And what I was cautioning this body about then was that we have to be careful of addressing that issue now because the scale outpaces us so much as the years of experience increase.

And that is what we are finding now.

As I start to have more lawyers who have made it past that seven-year mark, and those are the ones I really, really want to keep, I can't possibly expect them to continue to work for between 20 and 50,000 less than what they could make elsewhere.

Thank you.

That's all I had for now.

Thank you, Chair Evans.

Um, Councilmember Pepti, you're recognized.