Editorial: Flaws in an Oregon agency’s request for money
Published 9:33 am Monday, January 12, 2026
Let’s say you are in charge of making recommendations for Oregon government.
You are a state legislator and have to make a choice about how to spend money on public defense.
You have a request for money from the state agency that administers public defenders in Oregon. The request is to switch some of the attorneys it uses from the private sector to attorneys employed by the state. It amounts to redirecting more than $1.6 million and hiring what would be six people for full-time positions.
A state analyst has concerns about how the agency, the Oregon Public Defense Commission, compared costs. The analyst has concerns about how the commission calculated attorney working hours between the two types of attorneys. He has concerns that the sampling of hourly rates because a state program boosted those rates. He has concerns that the priorities of the attorneys the state wants to hire would not be on higher-level crimes. He has concerns about the implications for public defense in rural areas. He has concerns that the agency wants to take the alleged savings it identified with a questionable methodology and hire more attorneys when the state has declining resources.
Then, after all those concerns, the analyst recommended that the Legislature agree to the Oregon Public Defense Commission’s request.
“However, this type of agency initiative to more closely examine the underlying cost-drivers of public defense, is long-overdue and PDC (Public Defense Commission) is encouraged to undertake a more comprehensive analysis to better support future cost-savings initiatives,” he wrote in his report.
We recognize that solving Oregon’s public defense crisis has been difficult. Public defense is not a job that many lawyers want to do, because of the pay, the workload and many other factors.
Oregon’s Public Defense Commission has made progress in reducing the numbers of unrepresented defendants by making changes, including by hiring its own attorneys and targeting them at counties with some of the most intractable problems.
Why reward the agency with what it wants, though, if the belief of a state legislative analyst is that the methodology for taking this action is so riddled with problems? At least, make a condition of any award of the money that the agency must answer the analyst’s concerns.
