Hawaiʻi public defenders have been waiting for 20% salary increases that went into effect more than six months ago, with the state agency responsible for administering payroll unable to complete the personnel and fiscal work on time, according to records obtained by Civil Beat and distributed by the Associated Press.
The delays have left public defenders’ pay short for about 12 straight pay periods, the reporting said, meaning attorneys who represent high-need defendants have been short-changed for work covered by the raise. While staff were told they would receive retroactive checks, the timelines for when the money would arrive have passed.
Rep. David Tarnas, chair of the House judiciary committee, said lawmakers had addressed the legislative side of the process and questioned why the administration did not finish implementing the increase. “The fact that the administration has not followed through on that is troubling, and I’m not happy with it, and I want this to be resolved,” Tarnas said, according to the report.
The Legislature last year set aside $1.6 million to increase public defender salaries, which the reporting said had lagged behind pay for government attorneys on the prosecution side. Before the raise, the entry-level salary for deputy public defenders was $75,948, a figure the report said was about 18% lower than the Attorney General’s Office starting salary and about 25% lower than the entry-level pay at the Hawaiʻi County prosecutor’s office.
Jon Ikenaga, who has led the public defender’s office since 2024, said the pay gap made it hard to recruit and retain lawyers and that the raises were essential for hiring needed attorneys. “They want to stay in public defense work,” Ikenaga said. “Sometimes the economy of it doesn’t make sense, so they’re forced to make choices that they normally wouldn’t because of the pay disparity,” he said. Ikenaga also said public defenders’ pay had been stagnant for at least a decade and that, even after the raise, public defenders remain among the lowest-paid government attorneys in the state, the report said.
The report said the salary disparity has been particularly acute on the neighbor islands. At one point, the Kailua-Kona Public Defender’s Office on the Big Island was so short-staffed that attorneys stopped representing clients charged with DUIs and some felonies, forcing the court to rely on a small pool of court-appointed private attorneys. The office recently hired an additional attorney, bringing staff to five with another position still vacant, and it has since resumed taking DUI and felony cases, the report said.
To address a statewide shortage of attorneys, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court launched a pilot program last year that allows lawyers from other states to work in Hawaiʻi without first taking the local bar, Ikenaga said. He told his staff that the program helped reduce vacancies, and that almost all vacancies on neighbor islands are now filled. However, the report said morale remained affected by pay and staffing pressures.
The reporting tied the compensation delays to severe staffing shortages at the Department of Budget and Finance, the agency in charge of human resources and fiscal management for the Office of the Public Defender and six other state agencies. According to emails and records described by the report, leadership warned shortly after the raise began that staff would not immediately see the increase.
About a month after the 20% raise went into effect on July 1, Ikenaga wrote to his staff alerting them that they would not see the increase in their Aug. 5 paychecks. He said the department’s human resources unit was down to one clerk and that a new supervisor “is not fully up to speed on the paperwork process,” according to the report’s description of the emails. The reporting said HR staffing included only one employee responsible for paperwork for multiple agencies and that a separate fiscal function was similarly short-staffed, leaving one person to manually calculate retroactive pay.
In describing the workload for completing pay adjustments, the report said Ikenaga told his team in a Sept. 4 email that it would be significant work even for two people, and far less feasible for a single worker, because the changes had to be applied across the office’s 101 attorneys. The report said the department was also missing workers in its fiscal division that handles inputting retroactive adjustments.
The report also said the budget and finance department eventually raised the need for additional gubernatorial authorization for releasing the funds. Ikenaga said he was told in October that he needed to request the governor authorize the release of the money, and that the amount his office would receive equaled $1.4 million—about $200,000 less than promised—requiring the office to cover a deficit.
Even after the raise took effect, the implementation timeline continued to slip. In a Nov. 26 email described by the report, Ikenaga told employees, “Hayley and I know how important these raises are to all of you and your families,” and said the raises were not a “luxury” but a “long-overdue necessity.” The report said he later told staff to expect the increases in a Dec. 20 or Jan. 5 paycheck, but an email on Dec. 31 said the raises still had not been entered into the payroll system and no estimate was provided.
As of the latest update in the reporting, staffing at the budget and finance department had improved, the report said. Acting finance director Seth Colby said the fiscal office was fully staffed and the HR office was down to one vacancy, adding that the department was prioritizing the processing of the attorneys’ raises and that other state staff were helping.
Ikenaga told his staff that increased paychecks are expected to start in February, but he said there may not be a single fixed date for everyone and that, even after payroll system adjustments, there could be a two- or four-week lag before the money is reflected. He told his staff, the report said, that the attorneys “have always been willing to make sacrifices,” even as delays continued.