By the end of March 2026, the Oregon Public Defense Commission believes it can eliminate the list of unrepresented defendants in Oregon.

The price: More than $114 million.

That doesn’t include what the state is already spending, what it will cost the state in ongoing costs and there are no estimates yet for some costs, such as hiring at least 160 more attorneys and then more attorneys in the future to keep the caseload for public defenders down.

The problems of Oregon’s public defense crisis are well known if you are a regular reader of the editorial page. Across Oregon, the public defense commission has been unable to provide public defenders for people who cannot afford them. It is an obligation under the U.S. Constitution and Oregon is failing to live up to it.

People have been held in jail without an attorney. People accused of serious crimes have been released from jail because the state could not provide them with an attorney and then failed to appear in court. And it also has delayed justice for victims of crimes.

“This is unacceptable,” Gov. Kotek wrote in a May letter to the commission. “We cannot allow the current state of affairs to be normalized.”

Unfortunately, it has become somewhat normalized. Go to the Oregon Judicial Department’s data dashboard on any day and you will find that there are thousands of unrepresented individuals. On July 30, there were 3,274 unrepresented individuals and 1,459 individuals who were previously unrepresented and did not appear in court. It’s been happening in Deschutes County, too.

The claim that the commission’s plan will have it fixed and the price tag come from a July 26 commission letter responding to the May letter from Kotek.

Kotek specifically requested that the commission clearly identify costs. Several public defense commissioners, including state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, urged last week that the commission be upfront about costs. The costs are not identified upfront in the letter, though they are there.

The commission’s plan is to build on what it has been doing. It wants money for the state to hire directly about two dozen public defenders that are qualified to handle felonies. It wants to add to the commission staff to better manage what it does. It wants to expand efforts to recruit new attorneys with incentives. It wants to expand the state’s efforts to hire public defenders directly rather than relying so much on contractors and paying attorneys by the hour.

For instance, the draft contained a proposal to add a state trial office serving Douglas County and the south coast of Oregon, where it has been difficult to find attorneys to work as public defenders. When the state hires public defenders directly, the pay and benefits are more lucrative and therefore it is easier to find people to do the work.

If we were a legislator or a governor looking at the commission’s proposal, we would want to see details about how the commission estimates each element of the plan will chip away at the crisis. For some of the initiatives, that can be harder to determine than others. And there are some explanations in the commission’s documents.

Some legislators will be thinking about other options than expanding public defense, such as changes in charging practices to limit the number of people who need public defenders in the first place. Of course, with the recent memories of the decriminalization embedded in Measure 110, that may not go over well.