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On the sidelines of the dismissed criminal case against former Gov. Rick Perry stands the Travis County district attorney’s Public Integrity Unit, which has lost staff and struggled to remain afloat after a political firestorm over the past three years stripped it of much of its budget. The unit, its officials say, has had to start turning away cases and no longer has the resources to provide counties with the investigative support it once did.
“We are a shell of our former selves,” said Gregg Cox, the Travis County prosecutor who oversees the Public Integrity Unit. “We might be able to prosecute certain cases more effectively. We probably have more experience and a better track record of handling those cases, but we are still having to tell those agencies, ‘Sorry, take it to county X, we just can’t do it.’”
The Public Integrity Unit’s troubles began during the 2013 legislative session, when Perry threatened to veto its funding in an attempt to force District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg from office after her arrest and conviction for driving while intoxicated. When Lehmberg declined, Perry cut all of the division’s $7.5 million from the state budget, trimming the staff from 35 to 17 employees.
Perry was indicted a year later, and the Public Integrity Unit remained front and center in a clash between lawmakers, some of whom saw its duties as essential and others who believed its prosecutions were partisan and politically motivated.
The division, created by the district attorney’s office in 1978, mostly handles fraud against state programs, insurance fraud and tax fraud. But it has grabbed the most headlines for its investigations into the ethics abuses of officials at the highest levels of government, less than 5 percent of its caseload.
The state budget didn’t restore any of the vetoed money the unit lost for 2016-17, and the 2016 county budget allocated $363,000 of about $1.4 million requested to keep the unit intact, forcing officials to cut an additional seven jobs for the fiscal year beginning Oct 1.
Cox said that to deal with the losses, officials have had to dissolve and reorganize the unit, which now falls under the Travis County Special Prosecution Division. The latest cuts include two investigators and a forensic accountant. The Public Integrity Unit has to share the three remaining investigators and support staff with the white-collar crime unit, which handles financial crimes with losses of at least $50,000.
Cox, director of the special prosecution division, said the Public Integrity Unit has been further hurt by at least four prosecutors and investigators who have left voluntarily amid the funding battles. With no receptionists or support staff, the office on the second floor of the Granger Building in downtown Austin now seems abandoned.
The unit could once provide forensic financial analysis and contract expertise to counties that didn’t have such resources, its officials said, and it could consolidate cases from multiple jurisdictions, making it easier to prosecute agents and corporations stealing from the state. It can now only take those cases that have been almost fully investigated by local law enforcement agencies, the FBI or the Texas Rangers.
Evidence of its financial struggles surfaced last month when Travis County prosecutors said they were no longer leading a criminal investigation into the Austin tech firm 21CT and its controversial technology deal with the state that spurred sweeping contracting reforms. “It gives me heartburn to think we could not prosecute that case,” said Susan Oswalt, chief of the Public Integrity Unit.
In April, it rejected a request from the Department of Public Safety to reopen an investigation into controversial border security contracts, telling DPS Director Steve McCraw the unit doesn’t have “sufficient staff or resources to accommodate your request at this time.”
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