Queens DA calls for slight budget boost
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Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz appeared before the New York City Council for a budget hearing on Wednesday, March 20, 2024. Photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The Queens district attorney on Wednesday appeared before the City Council to ask that the legislative body increase her office’s budget by around $5 million in the upcoming fiscal year.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz asked the city to approve her approximately $96 million budget, which comes in a little more than $5 million larger than her approved Fiscal Year 2024 budget, during a lengthy public safety budget hearing on Wednesday.
However, extra mid-year funding given to all of the city’s DA’s offices, including in Queens, put Katz’s office operating with a $107.4 million budget this year, making her latest budget request around $11 million less than the previous year. That extra funding came from both state and city funds, most of which went toward providing resources for aid to prosecution, the crimes against revenue program, helping DAs meet discovery obligations and personnel spending.
Mostly asking to keep her office’s funding consistent with the year prior, Katz said that money is still needed to hire more assistant district attorneys and pay them at a higher rate, and to boost the office’s technological capabilities, especially when it comes to implementing the state’s discovery reforms.
She also pleaded with the City Council to help her office secure a large office space so that those who work under her purview aren’t as spread out across Queens Boulevard, as currently is the case.
“Any reductions or elimination of the funding will only set us back and will impede future progress,” Katz said during her testimony on Wednesday.
Should each of the city’s DAs’ offices get the funding it requested on Wednesday, the Queens DA’s office would rank fourth in funding when compared to the other boroughs, despite having the second-largest population in the city.
Several months into her second term as DA, Katz began her testimony on Wednesday by laying out some of the units and programming she’s implemented since taking office at the start of 2020.
Katz highlighted the work of the Conviction Integrity Unit, the Human Trafficking Bureau, its Community Partnerships Division and her office’s efforts to seize ghost guns – no other DA office seized more ghost guns than Katz’s office last year.
“In order to maintain and build upon the progress that we have made, we need to be able to rely on sustained funding at the level that is appropriate to support the needs of the office and the people of Queens County,” Katz said in her written testimony.
“I ask for your support and commitment to continue both the city and state funding enhancements received by my office,” she added.
At the top of Katz’s funding request was dollars for assistant district attorneys.
Katz said that her office was actively recruiting additional prosecutors for her office’s upcoming classes and is hiring “experienced attorneys who can provide much-needed expertise in specialized areas including domestic violence, special victims, FOIL and civil litigation, and many other areas.”
Attrition issues that have affected all DA’s offices over the past several years have improved in Queens, Katz said on Wednesday.
Since March 2020, the office has grown by 78 ADAs, according to the Queens DA.
However, Katz added that the caseload for prosecutors working on misdemeanor cases have continued to remain high. As such, Katz said her office needs to hire more attorneys.
“Increasing our ADA staffing has helped reduce high caseloads, which in turn helps us better meet our discovery timelines and obligations,” she said.
But in order to get new hires through the door, the DA said she needs to be able to provide competitive salaries. Some of that funding has already been provided to the Queens DA’s office and Katz said that she hopes it leads to higher retention rates in the near future.
“Our ADA staff have long been underpaid in comparison to our other government colleagues, and without question, to attorneys working at private law firms,” Katz said in her written testimony. “The funding provided has and will continue to support a salary step program for our ADA staff. Having a salary structure in place is critical to showing a long-term commitment to our ADAs and allows them to envision and plan a continued career path with our office.”
“It is my hope that this will help address the recruitment and retention issues that my office has faced over the last several years,” she added. “Our ADAs work tirelessly to ensure that justice is being served each day and they deserve compensation that recognizes and reflects the value of their efforts.”
Though Katz and the city’s other DAs said their offices’ difficulties meeting the demands of the state’s discovery reforms had been calmed by a recent infusion of state funds, the DAs said they need the funding to continue in order for the progress to continue.
The Queens DA said that by using funding to boost her office’s IT abilities, prosecutors will have less difficulty meeting discovery demands.
In November 2022, Katz’s office was accused by the Legal Aid Society of failing to create evidence sharing procedures that allowed for criminal defense attorneys to easily parse through evidence being brought against their clients. While the city’s other four district attorney’s offices organized their evidence in descriptively named electronic files and had systems for naming documents, the Queens DA’s office didn’t have a clear protocol for naming files, often sent duplicate documents and generally lacked a clear evidence sharing system, the attorneys claimed.
As a result, the public defender group said its attorneys often spent hours of “unnecessary” work parsing through files and documents they received from Katz’s office, renaming and organizing them.
Katz said on Wednesday that changes were being made.
“While significant progress has been made in this area, there are currently many large-scale IT projects underway, and many others being planned for the next several years,” Katz said. “The funding provided will enable us to purchase much-needed IT software and hardware that will ensure that our IT infrastructure is safe and secure; will facilitate the sharing of discovery material and aid in compliance; support data-driven decision making so that crime trends are being actively addressed; and provide state-of-the-art discovery solutions.”
Beyond funds for staffing and discovery obligations, Katz more broadly pleaded with the Council on Wednesday for a new office.
Currently, the Queens district attorney’s office is spread across five buildings throughout the borough.
However, Katz said that the disparate nature of the offices means members of her staff can’t often easily get together in person to discuss cases or programs.
“We need to have them in one location,” she said.
