Brunswick Judicial Circuit District Attorney Keith Higgins will stop assigning prosecutors for Glynn County Juvenile Court cases starting Oct. 1 due to a lack of budget for his overworked and understaffed office.
The decision comes as the latest consequence of a budgetary battle between the DA’s office and the Glynn County commissioners that has been brewing since January, when accounting errors led to an increase of hiring beyond the prosecutor’s approved budget.
Higgins wrote in a Sept. 4 letter that the budgetary distress meant his office must cut payroll and cease representing the state in Juvenile Court, a decision that he told The Current will negatively affect public security.
“To cut payroll, I’ve left positions vacant. I have reduced, basically terminated two employees as a reduction in force, and I have moved county-paid assistants DAs into any vacant state paid positions that became vacant,” he said. “And so at the end of this month, at the end of September, I will have only 12 prosecutors for the entire Judicial Circuit, I will only have one attorney in the Appling County office, I will have three in Wayne, four in Glynn and four in Camden County.”
Higgins told The Current he sent a letter to each of the five counties in the judicial circuit, the judges in Glynn County, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, and Glynn County Commission Chairman Wayne Neal.
The Brunswick-area DA’s financial deficit was a result of accounting errors, according to Higgins. The gap was discovered in February after his office hired three employees with county funding that the office did not have in January. On July 16, Higgins asked Glynn County commissioners for a supplemental budget request of $362,000 to cover the staffing requirements. But the request was deferred.
In a letter provided to The Current dated July 31, 2024, from the Board of Commissioners to Higgins, the commissioners rejected Higgins’ request and threatened to cut off payroll processing if he didn’t fix the problem by Aug. 31, 2024.
“We hope that you can understand the tenuous and extremely difficult position that this places us in, particularly when over half of that total amount appears to be for personnel and services that went to the benefit of other counties in the circuit. While various paths forward have been discussed, the Board of Commissioners is not in a position to waive or forgive these unreimbursed expenses for the last fiscal year, nor is it in a position to permit this figure to grow even larger,” the letter said.
It quickly became clear that the only way to bridge the funding gap would be to cut staff and services, according to correspondence between the county and the DA’s office.
By early September, the amount the county said it would claw back from the prosecutor’s office had jumped to $936,753.28, an amount that did not include the payroll expense for salary period ending Sept 7.
Higgins told The Current that the county is requesting a total monthly reimbursement of about $108,000. Higgins also said that the public should know that public safety will be at risk due to the current limitations of the office. Cases will take longer to resolve, which will increase costs for the county and result in longer periods of incarceration.
“I’ve been pushed into a situation the district attorney’s office has played in place in a situation where we simply don’t have the ability to both prosecute the most serious crimes in superior court and also represent the state and juvenile court, and that’s why I wasn’t put in the situation, that I have no choice but to opt out of representing the state and juvenile court, ” he said.
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