Legislators heard two narratives about Oregon’s public defender crisis Tuesday. One was that things are happening to reduce the number of unrepresented defendants. The second is that the trend of unrepresented defendants is not going down.

They can both be true.

Every defendant in Oregon is entitled to receive Constitutionally competent and effective representation. The state of Oregon fails to provide it.

As of Feb. 6 there were 2,751 unrepresented defendants in Oregon. It’s worse in some counties than in others and not as bad in Central Oregon. Jackson, Multnomah, Marion, Washington and Douglas counties have had some of the worst of it. Most unrepresented defendants are charged with misdemeanors, 1,450 as of the end of January. Another 985 were charged Class C felonies. Only 77 were Class A felonies.

Representatives from the Oregon Judicial Department and the Oregon Public Defense Commission told a legislative subcommittee that as the state added more attorneys, the number of unrepresented defendants has grown.

The state did recently add a net of 16 attorneys who can handle misdemeanor cases. It also lost a net of six attorneys that can handle major felonies.

Legislators seem likely this session to recriminalize minor drug possession to a Class C misdemeanor. Legislators also seem likely to change the law so more drug dealers may be prosecuted. Those changes are needed. They will put additional stress on Oregon’s public defenders.

The state also has a problem with up-to-date data. It doesn’t have it to measure public defender capacity. The Oregon Judicial Department has some pieces. The Oregon Public Defense Commission has other pieces. They have not been able to make them mesh, so far. So the state does not have a real-time dashboard of what it has and what it is missing.

Legislators returned to the issue of data again and again Tuesday. They didn’t get an answer of when it would be resolved.

We are being asked to make resources available without having all the puzzle pieces, state Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Forest Grove, pointed out.

Representatives from the Oregon Public Defense Commission told subcommittee members that they have two policy proposals for legislators to consider this session. The first is a request for $3 million to hire the rough equivalent of 10 more contracted public defenders. The second is for $3.1 million to extend a program that pays attorneys more to represent unrepresented defendants who are held in custody.

They sound like good ideas, but remember that statement from Sollman?

State Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth, made an appeal for people watching the subcommittee meeting not to get the wrong perception of what was going on.

“We are slowly making progress. We are hiring people,” he said.

He’s not wrong. But try telling that to the thousands of defendants facing charges in Oregon — and even held in custody — without a public defender assigned to them.