Brunswick-area District Attorney Keith Higgins will address Glynn County commissioners next Tuesday in an effort to work through his budget battle to fund his office. The county says he owes nearly $1 million back to the county for overruns.
Glynn is the largest of the five-county circuit that he manages, with the most crime to prosecute and funding to offer, but the district attorney’s political and professional relationships have soured after a budget crisis last year.
Glynn commissioners want the office to repay the approximately $1 million in excess spending, but Higgins said he has already severely cut back on staff to meet their demands. Higgins is scheduled to present a new plan for staffing at a county work session on Jan. 21, 2025, so he can keep his office of 12 prosecutors who are already struggling to handle the towering amount of criminal cases in their jurisdiction.
Here are five things to know about the crisis:
Who pays for what at the Brunswick Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s office.
Last summer, the DA’s office had 48 employees, including 16 prosecutors and 34 support staff that includes legal assistants, investigators, receptionists, IT managers, office managers, executive assistant and accountant/payroll clerk. Currently, the department employs 31 people including Higgins; it doesn’t include two circuitwide employees who work on contract.
Here’s the breakdown of where each employee works in the 5-county circuit:
Jeff Davis/Appling counties:
- 2 legal assistants
- 1 victim advocate
Wayne County:
- 1 legal assistant
- 1 victim advocate
- 1 prosecutor shared between Jeff Davis, Appling and Glynn counties
Camden County:
- 4 prosecutors
- 2 legal assistants
- 2 victim advocates
Glynn County:
- District attorney
- Chief assistant DA
- Office manager
- Director of Victim Services
- IT manager (for the circuit)
- 4 prosecutors
- 3 legal assistants
- 3 victim advocates
- 2 investigators
For circuitwide contracts:
- Drug court ADA
- Asset forfeiture ADA
The DA’s annual budget is funded by the state each of the five counties in the judicial circuit and grants. The counties pay in proportion to their population size. Those are Glynn, Camden, Wayne, Jeff Davis and Appling counties.
In fiscal year 2025 Glynn appropriated 52% of the funding ($1,300,977). Camden County pays $773,145, Wayne County pays $268,717.60, Appling County paid $126,400 in FY 24 (but did not provide updated amounts to The Current) and Jeff Davis pays $63,996.
Glynn, Camden and Wayne counties are not paying full disbursements to the office.
The state, meanwhile, funds the district attorney’s salary, seven assistant district attorneys, two administrative assistants, one Investigator and one victim advocate. There are no figures on how much money the state pays for the employees as the money is not appropriated specifically to the office. Their benefits and salary are directly disbursed from the State of Georgia, according to the office’s current financial staff.
Last fiscal year the state funded nine assistant district attorneys for the circuit. They authorize funds based on the number of positions defined by statute. Which is based on a ratio of one assistant DA for each superior court judge, an assistant DA position for the chief assistant DA, one for drug court and one for juvenile court, but Higgins no longer represents the state in juvenile court.
Additionally, three other staff lawyers have been funded with AARPA funds, which are running out at the end of this month. One of those lawyers remains on staff, and the other two resigned.
There are no state or national standards for recommended caseloads per prosecutor, due to its difficulty to measure and variation by office. The National District Attorneys Association warns against “a workload that is inconsistent with the prosecutor’s duty to ensure that justice is done in each case,” according to its standards. A 2011 study from Northwestern University Law Review found that excessive caseloads cause trial delays, an overreliance on plea agreements, and harm to the rights of defendants and victims.
An examination by the Savannah Morning News in 2023 into the caseloads at the Chatham County District Attorney’s office revealed variations in caseloads in other Georgia counties compared to Chatham. In DeKalb County, prosecutors trying lower-level felonies averaged around 190 cases, while in Clayton County, attorneys prosecuted around 200 to 300 cases on average. Chatham County’s average of 369 active cases for its 12 felony prosecutors was considered high by experts interviewed by the paper.
In Brunswick, the situation appears to be just as dire: In July 2024, Higgins’s office had 6,640 open cases in the circuit.
Causes of budget deficit
The current legal battle between Higgins and Glynn County hinges on three major questions of budget oversight, administrative oversight and financial reconciliation.
Because of its relative size in the judicial circuit, Glynn County’s government traditionally has handled payroll for the Brunswick-area DA’s office. It issued paychecks to staff and then reconciled the county’s financial books by having the DA’s office transfer money it received from the other counties in the circuit.
Higgins says the root of the budget problems stems from haphazard reconciliation processes and delays of budget transfers from the counties that he serves.
In January 2024 he hired three new employees based on positions that should be paid with county funds, a decision that he felt could alleviate workload pressures on his staff. His financial administrator said that funding for the new hires was secured.
That advice appears to have been wrong.
It is unclear how often the Glynn government and the DA’s office reconcile their finances. Budget gaps started to grow last February, according to Glynn County Manager Tamara Munson.
In January 2024, county officials processed salary payments as usual. The county told Higgins of his $880,000 budget debt in February, just a few weeks after the new attorneys started work.
The deficit reported by Munson’s office seemed to indicate that something had been out of balance for months.
Higgins did not immediately lay off his new hires. He has refused to answer questions about his reasoning for that decision, or how the office financial administrator could have misinterpreted the budget spending.
“The staff that I have handling financial matters for me in the office miscalculated the amount of the county funds available to hire assistant DAs. They got it wrong,” Higgins told the commissioners last year.
By September 2024, the deficit had reached nearly $900,000. Glynn County commissioners denied Higgins’ request for a supplemental $362,137.70 in July to allow him to pay the remaining $517,862.20 back to the county over a four-year period.
Higgins says the financial administrator no longer works in his office.
Glynn County believes the lack of accountability lands squarely in the DA’s lap.
“The district attorney was solely responsible for his budget and determining what he could afford, because we didn’t know what he was being paid by the other four counties, whenever he would turn in requests people to payroll, that was his responsibility to make sure that he had enough money in his budget from to be able to pay the people he was hiring,” said Munson.
No one has alleged any financial misappropriation. Neither, however, has the district attorney and county agreed to a repayment plan.
Other counties have budget problems with the DA’s office
The Camden County Board of Commissioners says that Higgins’ office also has a debt of approximately $58,000 to their county. The DA’s office has not reimbursed Camden County for payroll expenses for July 2023, May 2024 and June 2024.
The county has entered an 11-month repayment plan, in which it sends less money each month to the DA’s office until the deficit is paid off. According to the county’s communication director, the deductions are to pay staff that work in the Camden County DA’s office directly per Higgin’s request. The county is also directly paying a juvenile judge because Higgin no longer represents the state in juvenile court. Camden is the only county in the circuit that does not have a state court.
Additionally, Wayne County had funded the DA’s office at approximately $21,000 per month. However, this past year Higgins ended juvenile prosecution and moved ADAs from the Wayne County office. Now, the office receives approximately $5,000 per month, which covers the operational cost of the Wayne County office.
Impacts to budget crisis
Since July 2024, Higgins terminated a legal assistant and his executive assistant in a layoff; 17 employees have resigned for myriad reasons.
In September, the DA’s office stopped representing the state in juvenile court due to a lack of staff attorneys. Glynn County, meanwhile, has had to pay a lawyer in private practice to handle the caseload.
Glynn County rejected Higgins’ initial repayment plan, and started withholding money that county commissioners had approved for this current fiscal year budget.
In the fall, Higgins sued the county for nonpayment of authorized budget funds.
The core of the lawsuit is based on the county’s refusal to disburse the budgeted $108,000 of monthly disbursements to the DA’s office.
The county now says it wants Higgins to clearly outline the exact expenses that Glynn County’s money is covering.
“We’re requiring him to justify what he’s using that money on, if he sends up a bill for $108,000 and he has justification, we’ll pay it, but he has to justify where that money is going,” said Munson.
What’s next
Glynn County has yet to respond to the lawsuit, but Higgins and county administrators have continued to communicate through back channels.
Munson has said repeatedly that she wants the DA’s office to provide more detail about its monthly personnel expenses and for Higgins to confirm which of his staff members work solely on Glynn County cases.
The county insists that Higgins’ office pay the accrued debt. In the plan he is set to present Tuesday, Higgins seeks to keep his office operating with 12 prosecutors and wants to hire one more.
County funds usually serve as the chief form of funding for a district attorney’s office, say Higgins’ colleagues elsewhere in Coastal Georgia, who sympathize with the lack of appreciation among elected officials for the hard work that prosecutors face.
“I’m just saying that I’m empathetic to the situation. But this all really highlights a much bigger issue, which is that at the end of the day, prosecutors should be getting paid $125,000,” said Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones.
“They should be getting paid at least something close to what private practice makes. We don’t get a lot of fringe benefits, and it’s round-the-clock work.”