County's release monitoring program may face budget ax.

Byline: The Register-Guard

A program that successfully monitors domestic violence defendants who are released from jail pretrial could be a model for other categories of accused offenders, Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner said.

"Any way you slice it, that program is a huge success," he said of the Victim Safety Program.

It appears, however, that the county is more likely to lose its existing success story than to create additional ones.

With the nationwide recession biting into state revenue, Gov. Ted Kulongoski ordered all state agencies - including the Oregon Judicial Department - to prepare for substantial budget cuts for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul De Muniz responded by submitting three scenarios to the Legislature, representing reductions of 10, 20 and 30 percent.

Even the rosiest scenario would eliminate all state Circuit Court pretrial services, a key component of the Victim Safety Program.

Susan Sowards, a Lane Council of Governments planner who applied for the federal grant that funds the monitoring program, said the county would likely have to return the federal grant it is using to run the program if state pretrial services go away.

The monitoring program would not be able to function without pretrial service personnel, she wrote this week in a letter to Lane County Circuit Presiding Judge Mary Ann Bearden and Trial Court Administrator Elizabeth Rambo.

The program's probation officer would have nothing to monitor if the state officials aren't "conducting risk assessments, working with the project team to decide who is released on agreement, and negotiating the terms of the agreement with project staff and the defendant," Sowards said.

Gardner and Lane County Sheriff Russel Burger also have written to express their concern about elimination of pretrial services, saying it would ?"put the public at greater risk."

Burger noted that inadequate jail funding, long a problem in Lane County, forced the early release of nearly 3,800 inmates in 2008. His office and pretrial services have mitigated the community impact of that revolving jailhouse door by creating a Defendant and Offender Management Center, the sheriff said.

The center determines which inmates to keep in jail and which to place in alternative programs - such as work release or electronic monitoring - with an eye to reducing the number of repeat offenders, the sheriff wrote.

"A foundation block of that system is a risk assessment of every offender that books into custody," Burger wrote. "The assessment is done in pretrial services a the end of pretrial services would also mean the end of the DOMC."

The result, he warned, will be "hundreds of inmates into the community with no release conditions to abide by."

Bearden needs no convincing to urge state court managers to reconsider eliminating funding for pretrial services, family court assistance, drug court and other programs. Such cuts would disproportionately hit Lane County, she said, because its jail bed shortage has forced it to rely on alternative ways of managing accused and convicted offenders.

- Karen McCowan