Attorneys for Children Lawyers Call for $60M Budget Increase
The requested boost, they said, is needed to provide competitive salaries in order to guarantee equal access to justice for children.
Nearly a dozen New York Attorney for Children offices say the state executive branch’s proposed increase of nearly $20 million for their services in the fiscal year beginning in April is nice, but not nearly enough.
The offices, through a white paper released on Monday, call for an infusion of $60 million through the Office of Court Administration, to “right-size” their programs that represent children in abuse and neglect cases in family courts.
The requested boost, they said, is needed to provide competitive salaries.
“If equal access to justice for children is to become a reality in our family courts, attorneys representing children must have the capacity to work with each of their young clients to ensure family court proceedings are fair to them as well as to their families and the communities in which they live,” the report’s executive summary stated.
“Without reform of the caseload standard and without these necessary funds, the State will perpetuate the imbalance in the juvenile legal system that favors one side of the court process to the detriment of AFCs and children’s access to justice,” Dawne Mitchell, chief attorney of the Juvenile Rights Practice at The Legal Aid Society, a report co-author, stated.
The advocates said the state’s proposed increase of $19.7 million through OCA would only be a start toward meeting their needs.
A lack of sufficient funding for AFC offices has resulted in high caseloads and imperiled the providers, said the 15-page study, “Legal Representation of Children in New York State: The Crisis of Chronic Underfunding and High Workloads for Attorneys For the Child in Family Court.”
It said AFC offices had suffered through 1% or 2% budget increases for close to two decades while caseloads increased in number and complexity, and experienced AFCs resigned in record numbers, according to the paper.
Despite the budget increases for AFC offices during the present fiscal year, salaries of attorneys in most AFC offices continue to lag behind those of government counterparts and other civil legal service providers, the organization said.
Attorneys at Legal Aid of Rochester start at an annual salary of $60,000, increasing to $67,500 in Year 5, while the government and Family Court counterparts earn $84,000 in Year 5.
AFC’s starting salary for Suffolk County Legal Aid is $70,040, increasing to $77,500 by their fifth year, as government counterparts earn more than $100,000 annually by Year 5.
Legal Aid Society of New York City determined its attorneys are underpaid by 30% when compared to attorneys at the Office of the Attorney General, where the starting salary is $90,000.
AFC offices sit with vacancies that take months to fill, if they can be filled at all, as opposed to 10 or 20 years ago, when they were inundated with job applicants for a small number of vacant positions.
At least $50 million is required to achieve the staffing levels and salaries necessary to reduce case caps from 150 children per attorney to 75 cases in abuse, neglect, custody and related proceedings.
The other $10 million is necessary to enhance staffing and begin to reduce caseloads in delinquency proceedings.
Christine Gottlieb, director of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic, said: “There is no more important judicial function than protecting the rights of children and families. Courts cannot meet that mandate when the attorneys who appear before them have unmanageable workloads. Reducing the caseloads of attorneys for children is a necessary step toward building the Family Courts that families deserve.”