Hillar Moore sounds the alarm on his office’s underfunding

East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore has issued a stark warning about the financial challenges facing his office.

Speaking at the Press Club of Baton Rouge’s meeting Monday, Moore said his office is grappling with an overburdened staff and a mounting backlog of cases in large part because it is significantly under-resourced compared to its counterparts in similar jurisdictions.

For context, the East Baton Rouge Parish DA’s office’s annual budget of about $16 million per year is significantly smaller than the budgets of the DAs’ offices in Jefferson and Orleans parishes—about $24 million and $21 million, respectively—despite East Baton Rouge Parish being more populous and experiencing more worrisome homicide trends in recent years.

“The public would be much safer with an office that’s fully funded,” Moore said. “Not only would the victims be served better, but the defendants would be served better as well. That’s important because we don’t want them coming back [through the system] again.”

In 2024, the city-parish allocated $8,704,640 to the DA’s office. While the office requested $9,091,440 for 2025, it will receive only $8,269,410 thanks to budget cuts brought about by the incorporation of St. George.

Moore’s solution? A new 4-mill property tax.

For those unfamiliar, one mill equals $1 in tax revenue for every $1,000 of assessed property value. Voters will likely be able to decide the fate of the proposed tax, which would raise roughly $20 million per year, on May 3.

If approved, the funds would go a long way toward addressing the office’s staffing woes and tackling its current backlog of about 20,000 cases, according to Moore.

“I have some of the hardest-working men and women you’ll ever see, and I’m worried about their health,” he said. “I can see it in their eyes. What really [drove] me to go with the tax was listening to them ask, ‘Any chance we can get some help?’”