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Californians deserve effective legal representation regardless of income, and counties share that commitment. But Assembly Bill 690 takes the wrong approach. It would restrict how counties contract for indigent defense services and impose new requirements for defense-related support services without providing additional monetary support.
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If you’re accused of a crime and can’t afford a lawyer, the state is supposed to provide you with a defense. But in much of rural California, that promise depends on a patchwork of private attorneys hired by counties for a flat fee per case — sometimes just a few hundred dollars, no matter how complex the case. AB 690, authored by Assemblymember Nick Schultz, D-Burbank, aims to ban this practice and overhaul how counties provide legal help for the poor.
Despite its good intentions, AB 690 would ultimately do more harm than good for rural counties. The bill would increase county costs and limit local flexibility without providing the state funding needed to meet these new obligations.
Counties support the goal of strengthening indigent defense services (legal services for individuals who cannot afford a private attorney). AB 690 would prohibit flat-fee and per-case compensation contracts and require counties to provide additional ancillary services, including investigators, social workers and interpreters. These services can play an important role in ensuring quality representation, but the legislation does not create a single new attorney, investigator or source of funding.
That disconnect between new requirements and available resources is at the core of county concerns with the bill.
The right to counsel is a constitutional promise, but promises without resources are merely aspirations. Counties continuously strive to provide high-quality public defense, yet new state mandates that lack corresponding state funding make that goal harder to achieve.
Rather than partnering with counties to strengthen indigent defense, state lawmakers are increasingly advancing top-down proposals that add new requirements without addressing the funding and workforce challenges that stand in the way of lasting improvements.
Although California’s Constitution guarantees the right to counsel, the state remains a national outlier in how it administers indigent defense. It is one of only two states that provide no direct funding for basic public defense, shifting the full financial, administrative, and constitutional responsibility onto counties.
To meet their obligations 24 of California’s 58 counties rely on contract-based indigent defense systems instead of county-operated public defender offices. For many smaller and rural jurisdictions, this is not an ideological choice but a practical necessity.
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Operating a traditional institutional public defender office requires significant administrative infrastructure, permanent staffing commitments and benefit structures that many rural tax bases cannot sustain. Contract models allow counties to reduce the impacts of a limited pool of legal talent, manage costs and maintain constitutionally required representation despite persistent workforce shortages.
Those . Many communities are experiencing what have been called “legal deserts,” where the supply of practicing attorneys falls far below state averages. In Mariposa County, for example, there is approximately one active attorney for every 1,070 residents (compared with one for every 230 residents statewide).
With such a limited legal workforce, counties often depend on flexible contracting arrangements to ensure qualified counsel is available. Even counties with established public defender offices frequently rely on contracts to handle conflict cases, address staffing vacancies or respond to fluctuating caseloads.
Mariposa County illustrates this challenge. Rather than maintaining a costly centralized public defender office, it provides indigent defense through contracted attorneys. The county has also benefited from the state’s recent rural indigent defense pilot funding, including approximately $700,000 for local improvements. That investment demonstrates an important principle: meaningful system improvements are most achievable when the state partners with counties through funding and technical support.
Local government budgets are increasingly constrained by a combination of essentially static local revenues, rising costs and unfunded state mandates. In this fiscal environment, counties remain deeply concerned about legislation that imposes significant new costs without providing the resources needed to implement those requirements successfully.
For rural counties, those pressures can be magnified by a single complex criminal case involving multiple defendants, which can consume a substantial portion of an already limited budget.
Meaningful reform requires a different approach: a genuine statewide partnership, ongoing state investment in indigent defense infrastructure and strategies to expand the pipeline of rural defense attorneys. Protecting the right to counsel is a shared responsibility, and the state must help bear the cost of fulfilling it.
Miles Menetrey is a Mariposa County supervisor and chair of the Rural County Representatives of California.
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