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District attorneys ask for $8M for child-protection prosecutors and new rural recruitment incentives
Summary
The District Attorney Council asked for five budget items including $8 million for specialized child-crimes prosecutors, recurring loan-assistance and locality incentive programs to retain prosecutors in rural counties, a $500,000 capital-homicide resource fund, and recurring funds for digital evidence storage and IT.
The District Attorney Council told lawmakers it needs targeted, recurring funds to staff specialized prosecutors and retain talent in rural districts.
Jennifer Austin, a district attorney from District 21, pressed for an $8 million strategic fund to add or properly compensate child-crimes prosecutors across districts, citing the specialized skills required for forensic interviewing, DNA interpretation and courtroom presentation. "Our children deserve better than that," Austin said, arguing that rural counties often cannot recruit or retain experienced prosecutors and that continuity matters for both criminal and deprived dockets.
DAC also proposed two rural-focused programs: a loan-assistance plan modeled after teacher incentive programs to help new hires make student-loan payments and stick to 5–7 year retention windows (presented by Kyle Kobelka), and a locality incentive fund (Jack Thorpe) of roughly $4–4.5 million to target recruitment dollars to hard-to-staff counties. The council said these are recurring asks and would be administered with local DA input.
Eric Johnson, a DA in District 22, sought $500,000 recurring to create a capital-homicide resource committee to provide best-practice coaching, evidence storage standards and specialized prosecution support for rare, complex death-penalty cases. Tommy Humphreys and DAC staff described a separate recurring ask to fund cloud-based archival storage and equipment tied to a recently deployed case-management system that about a third of districts have implemented.
Lawmakers probed program specifics, asking how the $8 million figure was calculated, whether hiring would raise prosecution volumes or speed case resolution, and how DAC will measure outcomes. DAC representatives said the funds are intended to improve specialization and timeliness (not necessarily raise the number of prosecutions) and that they will track hires built into a statutorily-mandated budget formula and local decisions about use.
Committee members did not vote on the requests; they asked DAC for follow-up information and said they would weigh these items against overall fiscal constraints.
