BIDS Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Preview
Chart c/o Kansas Legislative Research Department.
by Heather Cessna, BIDS Executive Director
While fall may bring to mind thoughts of back-to-school activities, cooler weather, and pumpkin-spice everything, in the BIDS Administrative office fall means one thing: Budget time!
Every year, our budget for the next fiscal year is due to the Division of Budget by September 15th and this year, of course, was no exception. Here is an update on what we, as an agency, are asking for as part of our FY 2024 budget, which will start on July 1, 2023.
In addition to the obvious request that the Division of Budget, the Governor, and the Legislature continue to fund our current operations at their current funding levels, this year our Board has requested approximately $22.5 million dollars in additional funding enhancements for our FY 2024 budget. Just so you get a sense of the scope of what that additional $22.5 million is, our entire agency budget that pays for everything we do – all salaries, all casework, all panel attorney payments to private counsel and experts, everything from our capital cases down to our lowest level felonies, from trial through appeal and habeas – is paid for with a budget of around $46.8 million dollars. So the additional funding we’ve requested on top of that is, in a word, substantial.
Let’s break down what is included in those additional funding requests.
First and foremost, as our very first budget priority, we’ve requested funds for the next step in our salary progression plan for BIDS employees. This is a follow-up to last year’s all-agency reset pay plan. If granted, it will help us keep pace as our employees continue to gain experience and move along our pay scale progressions, as well as help us continue to retain employees and keep closer pace with prosecutors offices' periodic raises.
Second, we’ve asked for a large number of new full-time employee positions (131 new positions at a total agency cost of around $13.1 Million) to put more public defenders, legal assistants, investigators, administrative staff, and social workers or client advocates in all of our offices. This is only half of the funding and new positions we’ve calculated that we need in order to adequately address our current caseloads and cut back on the number of case refusals our offices have implemented over the past few years. The Board intends to make the second half of this request in FY 2025. These positions would cover our administrative office, our trial offices, our appellate offices, and our capital offices. They are absolutely necessary for us to adequately even attempt to meet the current national caseload standards.
We have a smaller number of other requests, including funding for expected capital casework, expanded software licensing for programs like Adobe, training budget funding, and additional funding for more lease space for some of our land-locked offices. And we’ve also asked for funds to increase our current private panel attorney rate once again so that we are better able to recruit additional attorneys to our appointment lists.
One of our other big asks this year is for funding for two new proposed public defender offices (along with the additional full-time employee positions to support them), one for the 29th Judicial District in Wyandotte County, and one for the 11th Judicial District in Crawford, Cherokee, and Labette Counties. The funding to support opening these new offices was requested after extensive data collection about the needs of those communities. Public hearings were also held in both communities to allow local stakeholders an opportunity to voice their opinion on the establishment of public defender offices in their area. Ultimately, based on the review of the data and the response to those public hearings, our Board, in both situations, voted to establish new offices in those communities. The first step in making that happen is to include it in our budget request and advocate that the legislature fund the establishment of those offices.
We will keep everyone updated on our budget progress as we move through the legislative session this year. This fall, we will get budget recommendations from the Division of Budget, and the Governor’s final budget recommendations for our agency will come out in January, right before the start of the legislative session. Then when the legislative session starts, we will be off to the races, having frequent hearings on our budget in both the House and Senate from the end of January through mid-March. The last few weeks of the session in late March and early April always involve some nail-biting moments as we wait to see what the legislature will include in their budget bills for our agency. But by the end of April or the beginning of May, we should know how we fared. So keep an eye out for updates along the way.
As you can see from these additional budget enhancement requests, my priority as the Director, and the priority of our Board, is to support our public defender office employees with good compensation and appropriate staffing levels, and to continue to support both our public defender offices and assigned counsel with additional infrastructure supports and funding to make the absolutely vital work that all of you do on our clients’ behalf easier and more rewarding. I’m excited to be doing that again this next legislative session through our important budget requests!