There was a lot of complaining in Salem on Monday Monday about Oregon’s public defense crisis.

State Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, questioned during a subcommittee meeting if the Oregon Public Defense Commission is treating the problem as it should.

“I don’t believe that you see the crisis at hand and have a plan forward to address this in a way that doesn’t require multi-millions of dollars on a workload change versus the crisis at hand,” she said.

Sollman is not the only one saying things like that. It is, though, about as harsh an indictment a legislator can make about a state agency. The Oregon Public Defense Commission is not able to see and prioritize the crisis it is supposed to be addressing?

There were many more complaints, during the subcommittee on public safety meeting. There was a complaint about the money spent and how the number of unrepresented defendants has grown. (As of Tuesday, there were 3,587 unrepresented defendants in Oregon. Some are in jail. There were another 1,665 defendants who had previously been unrepresented, did not appear in court and a warrant has been issued for them.)

There was a question that implied the commission and the Oregon Judicial Department weren’t meeting together enough. (That doesn’t seem to be true.)

There was a complaint that the state was not doing enough to track the impact of the Betschart decision, a federal judge’s ruling that says defendants held in jail for more than seven days without representation must be released. (There are estimates, but it is incomplete information.)

There was a complaint that if it’s a crisis, maybe the state should call out the National Guard — “They have lawyers.”

All the complaining is a reflection of the frustration of legislators. We can’t say we blame them. The state they were elected to lead is failing to provide a right to an attorney the Supreme Court says is guaranteed under the Constitution. It’s going to take millions more to fix the problem. It’s going to take time to build up a better system that represents all the defendants and that more lawyers would want to work in. The Oregon Public Defense Commission’s plan is for six years.

Legislators are our official, appointed complainers. Complaining, focusing attention, venting frustration when government is not working right is part of what they are there to do.

Dissecting Sollman’s comment, we believe her point is the commission is not putting enough emphasis on the priority of finding attorneys for people who are unrepresented today. Instead, it is working too much on other changes, such as shifting to a new model for what the state uses to track the workload of public defenders.

It was, in fact, the Legislature that directed Oregon’s Public Defense Commission to change its workload model. It was driven by concern that Oregon was providing inadequate public defense. And as Oregon did more work to analyze the workload of public defenders, it raised more concerns about workload. The state shifted to a new workload model, maximum attorney caseload, or MAC. It may be in some ways more fair for public defenders. It exacerbated the problem of representing all the people who need a public defender. Nobody seems particularly happy with MAC and the state is moving to another workload system that maybe people will be more particularly happy about.

It would be political malpractice for legislators not to complain about the public defense crisis. We need them to make a fuss about it, as long as they don’t destroy the morale of the people legislators charged with fixing it.