BATON ROUGE — The public defender's office is backing the District Attorney's tax proposal on Saturday's ballot.

District Attorney Hillar Moore has said his office has a backlog of cases because it's underfunded and understaffed.

Stephen Sterling, an attorney in the public defender's office, said it has the same problems and hopes to also benefit from additional funding.

Public defenders are assigned about 90 percent of the cases prosecuted in East Baton Rouge Parish, Sterling said, and they already work with limited resources.

"We're used to working on a shoestring budget and bare bones budget to where we get thrown rotten lemons," Sterling said. "if you can't make lemonade then you just make lemon water."

The 20-year property tax would raise more than $24 million a year for the D.A's office.  

Moore said that if the tax passes, he's asked the mayor to give the money that city-parish government allocated for his office to the public defenders office instead. This year that amounted to $8.7 million.

Mayor-President Sid Edwards' office said it is committed to allocating a portion of the money to the public defender's office, but has not determined how much.