SPOKANE, WA – Spokane officials warned Monday that the city may need to triple the size of the Public Defender’s Office by 2036 to comply with unfunded mandates imposed by the state’s high court.
The Washington Supreme Court issued an order last year that reduced the number of cases each public defender can handle from 400 to 120 annually. While Spokane’s attorneys have seen about 320 to 360 cases annually over the past few years, their caseloads are peaking under the city’s new camping ban.
Chief Public Defender Nick Antush told the Spokane City Council on Monday that his office has already refused over 160 cases so far this year due to a lack of resources – cases where taxpayers already foot the bill for the arrests, jail and other justice services, only to be thrown out due to a lack of public defenders.
“We’re looking at, you know, theoretically tripling the number of attorneys that we have in the office by the end of 10 years,” Antush said Monday during a council committee meeting. “We need at least a couple more attorneys this year to meet that 10% reduction, or we just have to file notices of unavailability.”
Under the court ruling, the current 400-case limit will decrease by 10% annually until it’s 120 in 2036.
Antush said the reinforced camping ban that the council passed in October, and misdemeanor narcotic offenses are about 30% of the city’s caseload. His office is facing about 200 additional cases than this time last year, forcing the city to turn some away if it can’t appoint a public defender in time.
Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates said the city is hiring more homelessness outreach workers with an existing contract to mitigate some of this issue, and Antush has a vacancy in his office to fill.
Filling that spot with another attorney will ease some of the burden, but only temporarily as caseloads fall. Antush said the main issue is attracting candidates, arguing that compensation poses an obstacle not only in Spokane but across the state. Public defenders in Spokane earn $72,474.48 to $121,250.
“There was some conversation in the fall around increasing this line item in our budget, and I think it might have went up a small amount, but nothing compared to what it needs to in order to be able to hire the defenders,” Councilmember Michael Cathcart said, reflecting on budget negotiations last fall.
The council has funded 26 full-time employees in the Public Defender’s Office over the last couple of years, including 20 attorneys in the 2025-26 budget. The office’s budget sat relatively flat for years, fluctuating between $3.1 million and $3.3 million from 2019 to 2023, before rising to $3.6 million in 2024. The council then adopted a two-year budget, allocating $8.4 million to the office for 2025-26.
The council initially allocated $8.2 million to the office for 2025-26, but increased that to $8.4 million in November. Like other public safety departments, the office is supported by sales tax and property tax revenue in the general fund, which has faced back-to-back deficits and could see another in 2027.
Yates said Mayor Lisa Brown and her administration are working with the finance team to determine how to fund additional public defenders. In the meantime, Antush is trying to fill the existing vacancy and use college interns to cover any gaps until the council potentially expands his budget later this year for 2027.
She said another option is to allow only prosecutors to file charges, rather than the police department.
Regardless, if Spokane triples the number of attorneys in the city’s Public Defender’s Office, it will cost taxpayers millions of dollars to meet the reduced caseload standards amid other ongoing budget woes.
“We are at capacity in the Public Defender’s Office and Prosecutor’s Office, and at Municipal Court, so we’re looking at how to address that,” Yates told the council, “but tripling, as Nick mentioned, would certainly create quite a challenge for us in terms of the footprint of our public defender’s office.”
