County OKs Second Public Defender’s Office Downtown : Finances: Move will save money by providing alternate attorneys for needy clients when there is a potential conflict of interest. Private lawyers now handle such cases.

Private lawyers got another knock in the chin Tuesday as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a proposal to start an alternate public defender’s office to cut costs for representing the poor.

The $3.5-million program would establish an office in the downtown Los Angeles courts to take criminal cases that the existing public defender cannot handle because of lack of resources or conflicts of interest--such as when two defendants in the same trial need appointed counsel. Such cases now are assigned to private attorneys, who are paid by the financially strapped county at a cost of more than $38 million a year.

“We have to make some savings for this county. These costs just keep going up and up,” Supervisor Ed Edelman said.

Currently, private attorneys appointed to represent indigent defendants work under fixed-fee contracts or at hourly rates of $55 to $80. Private lawyers will still be used by the county, officials say, but fees paid to them will be cut by more than $12 million if the new program expands across the county.

The proposal drew opposition from representatives of the 23,000-member Los Angeles County Bar Assn. and other attorneys groups, who told the supervisors that private criminal defense lawyers can handle the cases more cheaply than a new public agency could.

After all the jokes that followed the recent call by the president of the State Bar of California to end lawyer-bashing, Edelman made light of a one-page, last-minute proposal offered by Gerald Chaleff, president of the county Bar Assn. “This is not much of a proposal,” Edelman said, waving the page in the air.

Chaleff said the Bar did not have enough time to expand its proposal, which suggested that the county pay private attorneys an average of $1,200 for each felony defense and $300 per misdemeanor case. “Where’s the lesser cost?” asked Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, noting that private defense attorneys were already receiving those amounts in central Los Angeles courts.

When Chaleff challenged the county’s statistics and said he needed more time to find accurate numbers to work with, Supervisor Gloria Molina rolled her eyes. “It’s going to be another shell game,” she said.

The board approved the alternate defender program on a 4-1 vote, with Supervisor Mike Antonovich dissenting. The new agency is scheduled to start Oct. 1 with 36 salaried attorneys, paid a minimum of $70,000 annually.

In its first nine months, the program will handle a projected 2,410 felony and 3,375 misdemeanor cases, said Robert Meneses, a county management analyst. The funding, he added, is simply a reallocation of money currently allotted for the court-appointed attorney program.

Chaleff said the Bar Assn. will continue to work on its alternative proposal, arguing that if “that’s more economic for the county, it ought to be adopted.”

Private attorneys will still be needed, particularly in cases involving multiple defendants, said Richard Santwier, who heads the Bar Assn.’s 243-lawyer indigent defense program in downtown Los Angeles.

The public defender, or alternate public defender, cannot handle more than one defendant in a case because they often have conflicting interests, such as when one blames another for the crime.