Defender General warns contractor shortages, urges funding to stabilize public defense

The Defender General, Matt, told the Senate Judiciary committee on April 7 that Vermont’s public defense system is under pressure from rising caseloads, contractor shortages and sharply higher costs for third-party services.

In a 30-minute presentation, Matt said the Defender General’s Office provides public defense in criminal and juvenile cases, prisoners’ rights work, post-conviction relief and administrative defense advice. He said the office’s budget is split between state-employee public defender staff and privately contracted assigned counsel and conflict contractors, and that budget pressure is greatest on the contractor side.

“Ad hoc services are five times as expensive as our contracts,” Matt said, arguing that unpredictable ad hoc assignments drive costs and reduce control over representation quality. He told the committee the office has reduced reliance on ad hoc counsel and that cost-per-lawyer-equivalent-case (LEC) has fallen where triage and caps were applied.

Matt highlighted caseload trends: a roughly 7% overall increase in FY24 followed by an 11% rise in FY25, large increases in probation-violation cases (he said “other cases” rose almost 60%), and county-level spikes—Chittenden County accounts for a heavy share of statewide caseloads and has seen pronounced increases. He also said the office faces contractor attrition in several counties (for example, a marked drop in available contractors in Chimney/Chittenden county areas).

He described fiscal drivers beyond personnel: private evaluators and mental-health experts are charging much higher rates than before the pandemic (citing $600 per hour as a market rate in some out-of-state evaluations), and data-manager positions and required statutory training remain underfunded in the base. “If they’re getting $600 an hour, so are we,” he said of evaluator rates.

Matt complained the PD (public defense) special fund is chronically under-resourced and that a $610,000 vacancy-savings target in the governor’s recommended budget is unrealistic for his operations; he proposed a materially lower vacancy-savings expectation and said about $310,000 would be needed to make the target manageable. He also noted the House added a roughly $350,000 adjustment and that some one-time training funds were placed outside the base.

Why it matters: The Defender General warned that contractor gaps and higher support-service costs could slow case processing and reduce oversight of representation quality, particularly where counties concentrate large shares of the state caseload. The office asked for base restorations for training, adjustments to vacancy-savings assumptions and targeted increases to assigned-counsel contracts to keep coverage stable.

The presentation closed with an invitation for follow-up questions and a request that the legislature clarify whether it wants the Defender General to perform the full slate of services given current funding constraints.