Despite $13M stopgap, Maine’s public defense agency expects another funding shortfall

“We don’t have the ability to just stop spending money without violating people’s constitutional rights,” said Frayla Tarpinian in a commission meeting last week. “If they’re allowable expenses that are necessary for defense, we have a functional obligation to make the payments on those.”

Last year, a Superior Court justice ruled that Maine had violated defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights by not assigning them an attorney when they could not afford one. That same year, the list of indigent defendants waiting for counsel grew to more than 1,100. 

At the time, the state was still getting the relatively new network of public defender offices up and running, so the commission relied primarily on private attorneys to represent the people on that list. A year later, the backlog has shrunk to about 220 defendants, according to Tarpinian. 

“That was a huge success in this organization, and collectively there was a lot of work done by the attorneys to get that uncounted list down,” she said. But it’s also the reason for the projected increase, as cases take anywhere from six to 18 months to be resolved.

The commission’s $9 million annual budget does not account for the 2023 rate increase for contracted attorneys, which went from from $80 to $150 an hour. 

That same year, the state began to establish a more robust system of public defender offices, which now includes six physical locations across the state. 

But when that budget was presented to the Maine Legislature in early 2024, the offices were just getting set up, Tarpinian said. Although she was not part of the agency at the time, she said the budget assumed that by Fiscal Year 2027, which started in July, the offices would be fully functioning and the agency would not rely so heavily on contracted attorneys. 

“Part of it was they were overly optimistic in some of their projections,” she said. “The other piece of it, which I think is actually kind of more significant, is that they seriously undercounted the number of hours we had.”

Last year, the commission paid 325,000 attorney hours, which was a huge increase from previous years. Tarpinian said she does not see that number decreasing this year, although there are eight more staff positions that were funded through the supplemental budget that will eventually help the agency shift away from private attorneys.

Given that, the commission will be proposing a new budget with an increased annual baseline, which they will submit next month to the Department of Administrative and Financial Services.  Tarpinian did not disclose the amount of the proposed increase. 

“The last two years we’ve had to come back to the Legislature every session and beg for emergency funding to plug a gap,” Tarpinian said. “And so our goal is to make the ask that should take into account all of the factors, and will cover all of our expenses, so we don’t have to do this again.”

How the next governor and Maine Legislature will handle an increase in the commission’s baseline budget is yet to be determined, but there was broad bipartisan support for the $13 million stopgap funding last year. Commission Chair Joshua Tardy said during last week’s meeting that he plans to be in touch with all three gubernatorial candidates — Democrat Hannah Pingree, independent Rick Bennett and Republican Bobby Charles — about the commission’s budget and challenges. 

“I’m pretty confident that whoever goes into the Blaine House will have a receptive look at what our needs are, will look at progress we’ve made as a commission, and understand our baseline needs are critical,” he said.

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