Maine’s public defense agency fears that by next April it will not have enough money to pay all of its lawyers under the state’s new budget.

The Maine Commission on Public Defense Services was given roughly $51 million yearly in the state’s two-year $11.3 billion budget to fund their work finding lawyers for low-income Mainers in criminal and parental rights cases.

Despite their requests, the commission’s only budget increase from last year was a $3.5 million emergency boost that lawmakers agreed to in April to hire five new public defenders.

That bill passed after a judge ruled the commission was violating the constitutional rights of criminal defendants by not providing enough people with lawyers. She was planning to release people from jail who had waited more than three weeks for a lawyer, starting in June. Maine’s highest court paused that process last week, pending an appeal by the state, and court records show the commission had already found a lawyer for everyone who was eligible for release earlier in June.

The commission’s list of unrepresented defendants is still active, with 225 criminal cases and 125 parental cases that still needed lawyers as of Monday. Most of these are newer cases, suggesting there are less people languishing than last summer, when there were more than a thousand cases waiting for counsel.

Commission Director Jim Billings said the five new public defenders are not enough to continue the commission’s progress. He warned that the state’s roughly 30 public defenders will likely become saturated with cases, and private attorneys who are scared of not getting paid will flee for higher-paying work.

“Some people won’t be able to hang in there,” attorney Taylor Kilgore, a member of the commission, said in its monthly meeting Wednesday. “They’ll start leaving their cases in January in order to take other work to make ends meet.”

The commission asked earlier this year for enough funding to open three new public defense offices to cover southern Maine and the Midcoast, and to eventually reduce the state’s reliance on private attorneys, who courts appoint and the commission reimburses.

“Five attorney positions with some support staff is not even putting your finger in the dike,” Billings said. “We as a state are still relying on assigned counsel, private attorneys, to do the bulk of indigent criminal defense work. And by telling them we will not have enough money to pay you … this isn’t some foolish projection. It’s just the basic math.”

Billings said private attorneys will likely hit 325,000 billable hours of public defense work this year, all at $150 an hour, which pays not only for salaries, but overhead costs like office and support staff.

That’s roughly $49 million for private counsel — about $8 million more than what’s offered in the current budget. The commission is also receiving about $10 million in the state’s budget to pay for commission staff and public defenders, who, unlike private lawyers, are employed by and get salaries from the state.

Billings said the Legislature’s budgeting committee never scheduled a hearing or met with the commission, despite his requests. During one public work session, Billings said his staff heard members suggest the emergency $3.5 million increase was enough.

Committee chairs Rep. Drew Gattine, D-Westbrook, and Sen. Peggy Rotundo, D-Lewiston, did not respond to requests for comment.

Gov. Janet Mills urged lawmakers in January against giving the commission any new funding. She said the agency has more funding now than ever and that she had asked it to change its eligibility standards for private lawyers. Mills said she believes those standards are preventing private lawyers from taking on clients through the commission.

One of the first bills the governor vetoed this session was a proposal to expand which criminal defendants have a right to a court appointed lawyer.

“I cannot support creating a new statutory right to counsel when the state continues to struggle to meet even its minimum constitutional obligation,” Mills wrote in her veto message. “This bill will negatively impact the state’s ability to appoint attorneys in the cases where counsel is constitutionally required and impede efforts to eliminate the backlog in criminal cases.”

Billings disagrees their standards are keeping lawyers from signing up, writing to lawmakers in May that there “is simply not a huge pool of lawyers wanting to do this work that are not already doing so.”

The commission has experienced some success in recruiting private attorneys to their work — for two years in a row, the commission has seen more new attorneys applying to take their work than there are attorneys leaving, staff said in a recent memo. Nearly 45 new attorneys joined last year and at least 25 have signed up so far in 2025.

Part of the emergency bill in April also allows judges to appoint attorneys who aren’t on the commission’s rosters, but who the commission will still have to reimburse until a sunset date of Feb. 1, 2026. The bill provides $375,000 a year for these appointments.

Twenty attorneys have been appointed by judges to cases — six parental, three juvenile and 11 criminal — without consulting the commission’s rosters, according to spokesperson Barbara Cardone for the judicial branch.

“Some of the attorneys appointed in these cases are already rostered,” Cardone wrote in an email. “For whatever reason, the appointment was made directly by a judge.”

The commission wasn’t surprised by this at their Wednesday meeting.

“We never believed that there was a large segment of attorneys that wanted to do our work that couldn’t do it,” Billings told the commission.