photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Douglas County commissioners met for their second day of budget hearings for 2026 on Tuesday, July 8, 2025.

The Douglas County District Attorney’s Office wants the county to allocate more than $215,000 in its 2026 budget for two positions — positions it says are necessary to lighten the heavy caseload on its attorneys.

On Tuesday, during the Douglas County Commission’s second day of budget hearings, District Attorney Dakota Loomis presented the funding requests for two full-time positions at his office. The combined cost of the requests was $217,430.

The first request is to convert a part-time assistant attorney position to full-time, which would cost $130,688. This position would provide support for reviewing police reports, filing charges and handling major criminal and appellate cases, which the DA’s Office says would lighten its workload and reduce its reliance on outside contractors.

Loomis said converting the assistant attorney position wouldn’t just alleviate pressure on the staff, but would also make hiring easier. The request noted that it was difficult to find people willing to do this kind of skilled work part-time without benefits.

“The ability to hire a full-time position makes it easier to hire that position,” Loomis said.

The second request would be for a full-time legal assistant to support juvenile and truancy cases, and it would cost $86,742.

Loomis said the department in recent years has recognized a growing need to focus on juvenile cases. The request said that juvenile and truancy case processing responsibilities have temporarily been shifted to five staff members in the office, and that while this has maintained basic coverage, it is not a sustainable solution.

The DA’s Office’s request said that staff turnover has been high in recent years and the attorneys who remain at the office have faced increasingly heavy caseloads. It said the office averaged 154 cases per attorney, which it said was “approaching or exceeding” national averages. The request cited statistics from the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, which showed that in 2022 and 2023, the mean average of cases per attorney nationwide was 176, and the median average was 100. The request did not specify whether the county’s average caseload of 154 cases per attorney was the median or the mean.

In addition to these individual caseloads, the office said it had 460 cases “awaiting review or additional information.”

Commissioner Patrick Kelly said there had been significant increases in funding to the DA’s Office every year. He asked Loomis if the department had looked at whether it had the budget capacity to fund the new positions on its own.

Loomis said the department had had explored funding the positions internally. But he also said that his first months as DA, after taking over from previous DA Suzanne Valdez, were a period of transition and “triage” for the office.

“I can speak to what the first six months of my administration has looked like, which has been a large amount of triage as we get staffed up,” Loomis said. “Which means that while you can physically keep the doors open and keep running the office, there’s lots of priorities … that get dropped or get plugged on the back burner that I would say would be necessary to have more staffing to address.”

Some of the other organizations with additional funding requests to county commissioners include:

• The Sheriff’s Office, which is requesting $164,255 in funding for two additional network administrator positions for the department’s IT division. The Sheriff’s Office has six IT members supporting its own department and Emergency Communications, and one is primarily dedicated to supporting Emergency Communications.

Despite significant growth in both the office’s law enforcement and civilian personnel in recent years, its IT staffing has remained unchanged, the request said. County Administrator Sarah Plinsky told commissioners that this has been a request from the Sheriff’s Office for a number of years and related to its ongoing IT needs.

“Everything that happens at the jail, everything that happens on the operations side are worked with the IT team collectively, and it’s just getting way too much,” Undersheriff Stacy Simmons said. “We are holding on, but we are not meeting the future. We’re not meeting what we have to do now.”

As the Journal-World reported, the department is also requesting $281,348 in funding to add four new deputy positions. One deputy would be dedicated to serving judge-signed warrants, while the other three would staff the newly expanded and remodeled Judicial and Law Enforcement Center. Currently, the proposed budget includes funding for only two of the four requested positions.

• The Douglas County Historical Society, which has a request to fund half the salary and benefits for the Watkins Museum of History’s collections management assistant for one year. The full-time, three-year position began in 2025 with a $25,000 annual pledge from a private donor, contingent on matching funds.

The society applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in January 2025 to fund the required match for 2026 and 2027, but operations at the NEH were suspended and the historical society says it’s unlikely that it will receive this funding.

“That grant won’t happen,” said Steve Nowak, executive director of the Douglas County Historical Society. “And I was not able to come up with an alternative to replace that in time for the budget cycle, so I put it in as a one-time request in the hopes that we would go over the course of this year trying another grant opportunity.”

The society is also requesting $19,685 to support “Finding Freedom: The Promise of 1776 in Douglas County, Kansas,” a joint exhibition by the Douglas County Heritage Partners. Each of the partners — the Douglas County, Clinton Lake, Eudora Area, Lecompton and Santa Fe Trail historical societies — will host a unique chapter of the exhibit, with brochures and intro panels encouraging visits to all five sites. The exhibition explores the struggle to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s promises of equality and civil rights on the American frontier.

• Kansas Holistic Defenders, which has submitted a request for $44,000 to fund a licensed social worker. The position is projected at $88,000 annually, and the department will fund the other half of the position using private funds.

The request said that while Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center has two mental health professionals in the jail to assist staff with meeting inmate needs, those services end when a client leaves the jail. If the position isn’t funded, KHD will continue serving clients with serious behavioral health needs who don’t have a professional to manage their care.

What’s next?

Douglas County staff is proposing a $191.4 million budget for 2026 that will keep the property tax rate flat at 41.298 mills – one mill equals $1 for every $1,000 of a property’s assessed value. With the proposed rate, the county portion of the property tax bill would be $2,850 for a $600,000 home, $1,425 for a $300,000 home and $950 for a $200,000 home.

The amount a property owner pays is not entirely dependent on the property tax rate. It depends on both the mill levy and the assessed value of the property. Even if the tax rate stays the same or decreases, property owners may still see higher tax bills if their property values increase. The county’s total assessed property values increased by 5.7% in 2025; values increased 6.8% the year before that.

Budget hearings are scheduled throughout the rest of this week from 9 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, July 9, and Thursday, July 10, in the Douglas County Commission meeting room at 1100 Massachusetts St. Friday, July 11, has been set aside for additional hearings with departments requiring more time to meet with county commissioners, if needed.

On Wednesday, commissioners are scheduled to meet with several partners requesting additional funding, which includes Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical, Emergency Communications, Emergency Management, Baldwin City Chamber, Douglas County CORE, Child Advocacy Center and Center for Supportive Communities.

The public is welcome to attend in person or join virtually via Zoom, and no public comment will be taken during the hearings. However, the County Commission will have its business meeting Wednesday evening at 5:30 p.m., where members of the public can provide comments related to the first few days of hearings. Meeting details and recordings will be available on the county’s website. Budget deliberations are scheduled for Monday, July 14, at 9 a.m.

There will also be additional hearings for the five-year Capital Improvement Plan and Douglas County Consolidated Fire District No. 1, which are scheduled for 4 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 6.

The County Commission is currently scheduled to adopt the 2026 budget during a public hearing at its regular business meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 27. People can read the full proposed 2026 budget on the Douglas County’s Budget and Finance webpage.