Quick Take
In a tough budget year, Santa Cruz County is proposing to create an alternate public defender’s office to help reduce costs and maintain its holistic defense model, which connects clients with social workers and services. The move, however, would end a longstanding contract with a local law firm.
Santa Cruz County staff are scrambling to come up with a solution to fill a funding gap for the public defender’s office in a tough budget year, after the board of supervisors rejected a proposal to end a longstanding contract with a local law firm and create what’s known as an alternate public defender’s office.
In March, the county projected a $23.2 million deficit for the 2026-27 fiscal year, and a long-term structural deficit that could exceed $67 million by 2028-29 in the absence of mitigating actions. The county implemented travel and hiring restrictions and asked that departments look for ways to balance their respective budgets.
County Executive Officer Nicole Coburn said the county will need to pull from nearly $43 million in combined one-time funding from its general fund reserves and departmental trust funds to help avoid employee layoffs and keep safety-net services that are provided by the county, such as health and social services.
County budget manager Marcus Pimentel told the five-member board of supervisors last week that there is roughly $90 million left in total reserves. “There’s not a lot there for the next unexpected moment that hits us,” he said. “We’re thinner than we think.”
Chief Public Defender Heather Rogers had proposed ending a longstanding contract with a local law firm, Page & Dudley, to create an alternate public defender’s office to avoid layoffs and continue connecting clients to social services through the department’s in-house social workers.
“Strong public defense works like a levy,” said Rogers. “We invest in it before a crisis becomes catastrophe.”
Currently, Page & Dudley handles conflict cases, which arise when a public defender is not able to represent a defendant due to a conflict of interest.
Rogers’ proposal would have created an in-house alternate public defender’s office to handle those cases instead. She said the move would have helped prevent laying off nearly 11 staff members.
The department currently has 64 full-time employees — a mix of attorneys, investigators, social workers and administrative staffers.
The current two-year contract with Page & Dudley costs the county nearly $2.3 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year, and will cost nearly $2.4 million for the 2026-27 fiscal year. If the board of supervisors ultimately approves the establishment of an alternate office, the contract with Page & Dudley would end on Sept. 30 and would be only a partial contract.
Rogers said attorneys at Page & Dudley, which has 10 attorneys on staff, would be able to finish out their cases through the end of the contract.
Each attorney at Page & Dudley handles roughly 75 cases, whereas attorneys at the public defender’s office handle upward of 264, according to Rogers. Earlier this year, Rogers told Lookout that her department has been “overworked and underfunded.”
She added that to meet national staffing standards, the Santa Cruz County Public Defender’s office would need 43 more attorneys and more than double its $16, 207,577 budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year. The proposed 2026-27 budget is $20,810,738, according to the county website.
The in-house alternate office would be staffed by attorneys, investigators and social workers already working in the primary office, said Rogers, and in total would have eight full-time staff. Four of them would be attorneys.
Ending the contract with the local law firm would leave the attorneys without work. “Getting rid of all this experience is a major tragedy,” Mitchell Page, an attorney for the Page firm, told the supervisors. “There isn’t anyone here that’s saying we’ve been doing less than a sterling job.”
Rogers noted that this year’s budget is a “story of difficult trade-offs.” If the alternate office is not created, the department would need at least $1 million to fill in the budget gaps to prevent layoffs, said Rogers.
The alternate office would also prevent a disruption of providing holistic defense to clients as the county continues to face financial constraints, she said.
Holistic defense is a legal representation approach that is client-centered, tailoring each case to a client’s needs with social workers, who can connect individuals to drug or alcohol treatment programs to reduce incarceration.
“Holistic interdisciplinary defense is at the heart of what we do, and many of the clients served by our social workers and our advocates are people with serious illness, substance use disorders, trauma history and housing instability,” said Rogers.
Attorneys from the public defender’s office and the Page firm, along with community members, filled the community room at the county building in Watsonville to plead their case for creating the alternate office and keeping the contract, respectively.
Sarah Schumacher, an attorney at Page & Dudley, said taking staff members from the main public defender’s office and transferring them to the alternate office will cause both offices to be understaffed, create employee turnover and even potentially cause more conflict cases because attorneys’ caseloads are too high.
“No one in the courts wants this,” Schumacher said.
There was also disagreement among the supervisors about the proposal. “I think when proposals for these kinds of major changes are going to come to the board that we have some kind of conversation early on,” said Supervisor Justin Cummings.
Cummings said that canceling the contract with Page & Dudley would be a mistake. If the county decides to terminate its deal with the law firm, there’s going to be a loss of institutional knowledge, he said, and there’s no guarantee that any of these attorneys would want to move to the county’s alternate public defender’s office.
He suggested that the county look into using $1.1 million from its reserves to fill the funding gap to maintain the contract with the Page firm and avoid layoffs at the public defender’s office. While Cummings said he doesn’t want the county to further depend on reserves, his recommendation would allow staff to figure out a viable path forward.
“We aren’t in a place where we can afford to punt every time there’s a difficult decision,” said Supervisor Monica Martinez. “I am shocked that there’s a proposal for $1.1 million in reserves in order to serve a law firm.”
Coburn said that to keep things as they are, the county would need to find $1.1 million — $775,000 to support the public defender’s office and $350,000 for the Page firm contract. She advised the board to not take more money from the county’s reserves.
County staff are expected to return to the board of supervisors at its third budget hearing, scheduled for June 24, with a solution to fill the remaining $1.1 million funding gap in the public defender’s office, which could include potential layoffs.
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FOR THE RECORD: This story was updated to correct the number of full-time employees at the Santa Cruz Public Defender’s Office to 64, not 70 as previously reported.
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