The Vilas County Finance and Budget Committee will soon present a resolution to the Vilas County Board of Supervisors to join the Wisconsin Clerks of Court Association (WCCA) and the Wisconsin Counties Association (WCA) in their efforts to increase the Circuit Court Cost Appropriation by $70 million, payable to Wisconsin counties in the 2025-2027 state budget.
While Governor Tony Evers’s proposed budget, unveiled on Tuesday, Feb. 18, details goals of lowering costs for child care and taxes for working families, another part of the budget aims to address the shortage of attorneys and public defenders faced statewide and is considered a “crisis” by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
According to the State Bar of Wisconsin, out of the 20,706 active State Bar members, or professional associations that allow lawyers to practice in the state, only 364 active members are available to State Bar District 16, which includes Vilas, Oneida, Forest, Florence, Langlade and Marathon counties. Sixty percent of Wisconsin lawyers are located in the state’s three most urban counties, with nonurban communities often not even having 10 lawyers each, or counties having fewer than 20 lawyers. Vilas County Clerk of Circuit Court Beth Soltow says that Vilas and Oneida county courts often share attorneys when needed.
Evers’s budget seeks to provide more than $24.4 million in 2025-2026 and $70 million in 2026-2027 to county courts. However, in order for a county to be eligible to receive these support payments, they must offer a treatment, alternative, or diversion (TAD) program, which provides individuals facing criminal charges opportunities to seek substance treatment and other rehabilitation programs.
“In Vilas County, we do have a diversion program. However, I think that attaching strings to the dollar amount in that budget is not ideal,” commented Soltow, who was in Madison to meet with local legislators about the crisis as the budget was being discussed in late February. “This is a statewide push to help all of our counties and our circuit courts with court support payments, and there are plenty of situations in other counties where they’re just not able to have a diversion program…It’s not going to help everybody. I think that it needs to be available, fully, throughout the state, because it really is impacting every single county.”
Soltow was in Madison speaking with Rep. Rob Swearingen and Sen. Mary Felzkowski’s staff on the subject, hoping to highlight how much the crisis has hit close to home and how the funds from Evers’s proposed budget could benefit counties and court systems in the North Woods.
“In my observation, I think meeting with them was important because there was a lot of education from me to them as to all of the costs that go on in the county versus the state,” Soltow said. “We have two judges, and court reporters who are state employees, but everything else is funded by the county…I think it was a great educational experience for them. From where I was sitting, they seemed kind of shocked at how much it was impacting county budgets.”
Additional proposals in Evers’s budget to combat this crisis include providing more than $2.1 million in 2025-2026 and more than $4.3 million in 2026-2027 for market-based salary adjustments for assistant state public defenders, to attempt to increase retention of experienced attorneys; and providing more than $1.4 million in 2025-2027 to establish a new private bar reimbursement rate for serious cases, to improve the State Public Defender’s ability to recruit and retain private attorneys.
Soltow, who initially brought the resolution to support the WCCA and WCA to the Vilas County Finance and Budget Committee, says that while there is an effect on those who are awaiting trial with this shortage, the crisis can be costly for the counties themselves.
“In 2024, we went over our budget by three times just to afford court-appointed counsel for cases,” she explained. “That is about a 330% increase just to afford court-appointed attorneys.”
Soltow said that court-appointed attorneys are often paid approximately $100 per hour, amounting to about $2,000 per case, an expense that the county covers.
“We can’t make someone sit out on a bond or sit in jail on a bond, just kind of waiting and waiting and waiting, so that’s why it gets to a point where we have to do a court-appointed counsel situation,” she said. “It’s going to cost the county money, but they can’t just sit there and wait. (Going over budget by 330%), that’s a big number, especially for Vilas County, so you can imagine what some of the bigger counties are running into with all of this.”
According to the WCCA, Wisconsin circuit courts took in more than 757,000 cases in 2023, with the total cost to counties for running these courts being around $237 million, while direct support to counties from the state was only $28 million (approximately 14% of the actual cost). In the last 10 years, direct support from the state has increased by only $6 million, while the total cost to counties increased by nearly $38 million. According to the resolution that will be presented to the Vilas County Board, the increase in the county portion of the cost to run the courts is nearly six times higher than the increase in Circuit Court Cost Appropriation provided to cover these costs, and counties now pay almost $150 million more than the state in unbalanced Circuit Court Costs.
With court-appointed attorneys, counties pay 100% of the cost in the event that the State Defender’s Office is unable to provide one for a case, a problem which, according to the WCCA, has “increased dramatically” within the past 5 years.
“Without more support, counties will be forced to make cuts and would affect security and safety,” Soltow said.
The state is responsible for covering the costs of judges, court reporters, Consolidated Court Automation Program (CCAP) equipment, and the Circuit Court Cost Appropriation, while the counties are fiscally responsible for a majority of other functions in the court, including: bailiffs and court security officers, courthouse building maintenance, phones and utilities, Clerk of Court and Register in Probate, staff salaries and benefits, jury costs, psychological exams, guardians ad litem and court-appointed attorneys, expert witnesses, interpreters and translation fees, court commissioners, law libraries, corporation counsel, courtroom technology and audiovisuals, copying machines and other non-CCAP office technology, office supplies, furniture, recruitment and training, financial collection efforts, mail feeds, printing costs, exhibit and file storage, access to state data, insurance, service of court documents, judicial staff and attorneys, and equipment repair.
“It’s just a push of making the governor, and the counties and legislators, aware of what the budget hits we’re taking at a county level,” Soltow said. “I think that there would be a fiscal benefit to the county if this budget were approved...I don’t know that it will create a situation where it will entice attorneys or people to become attorneys so that we have more to choose from.
However, from a fiscal perspective, it would assist us as a county in our budget and it would assist the Vilas County citizens where that comes out of their taxpayer dollars.”
The resolution will be discussed at the Vilas County Board meeting on Tuesday, March 25.
While the attorney shortage isn’t an issue reserved solely for rural counties like in the North Woods, where it often takes anywhere from three to six months to assign attorneys to a case, according to Soltow this described crisis is something felt statewide.
Across the state, courts are being held up and congested due to the lack of public defenders able to take cases, stalling them and causing resolutions to take longer, with the issue being amplified in rural communities.
In an article released by the Wisconsin Law Journal in June 2024, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler said that there was a 7% decrease in active attorneys in rural parts of Wisconsin and fewer students enrolling in state law schools over the past five years, attributing this to the crisis currently being experienced in the state.
“I’ve seen the impact of the shortage,” comments Brynlei Kuhn, a student studying law in Madison who has shadowed legal professionals in Oneida County, including Circuit Court Branch II Judge Mary Sowinski. “It causes anxiety. Attorneys feel like they can’t retire because people still call and need legal help and can’t find other places to go.”
According to the State Bar, most attorneys who live and practice in rural areas are over the age of 60, and they are not being replaced when they retire.
While there are financial losses to not having attorneys, there are losses for those who are waiting for trial, including losing rights to a speedy trial and the potential loss of evidence as memories fade; there is also burnout suffered by attorneys and the accumulation of student loan debt being a deterrent for attorneys from joining the field.
To help combat the shortage, Ziegler helped establish an attorney recruitment and retention committee, which has been seeking possibilities to help draw attorneys, and graduating law students, to practice in Wisconsin.
The committee is currently considering incentives such as student loan debt forgiveness, pay enhancement for attorneys based on their location of residence, improving recruitment methods for students who could potentially start rural Wisconsin law practices, and extending diploma privilege, which allows Wisconsin law students to practice law without needing to take the State Bar exam, to out of state graduates to help draw lawyers to crisis-affected areas.
The committee has also been developing the Rural Clerkship Program, which places law students from Wisconsin and Minnesota into paid summer jobs in rural communities. The State Bar said that it plans to continue the program into 2025.
As the attorney shortage isn’t limited to just Wisconsin, the committee continues looking to programs and incentives offered in other states.
—Parts of this story were contributed and researched by Brynlei Kuhn.
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