BATON ROUGE -- The East Baton Rouge Metro Council approved $850,000 for the District Attorney's Office and $500,000 for the public defender's office on Tuesday afternoon.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore says that while the money helps, it will not overcome his office's budget deficits. He says it may even force him to take legal action.

"We wanted to be at $22 million, which is our tax proposal, and it's with the budget that we submitted to the Mayor, which obviously was not approved. Despite the hard efforts of the Mayor and the City Council and finance department and others that we have to decide very quickly now about filing up the lawsuit for the entire amount of what we believe is reasonable and necessary," Moore said.

Moore says that a lawsuit against the City-Parish has been prepared for some time, but that before he would take any legal action, he wants to sit down and discuss the matter with Mayor-President Sid Edwards and the EBR Metro Council to hear their plans for additional funding.

"The Mayor asked me to hold off until he and the Council and others could continue to search for other money," Moore said.

Members of the Metro Council say they're aware of how underfunded the DA's office is, along with the public defender's office.

"Both of those offices are in need of funding. The funding that we gave them tonight is not nearly enough. We will continue to look for additional dollars to be able to support them," EBR Metro Councilwoman Jen Racca said.

Moore says that the law requires that the district attorney's office for parishes/counties be paid what is reasonable and necessary to support their department. Moore argues that the city-parish isn't following that.

We're the biggest parish in the state of Louisiana, and our budget is much less than Jefferson and Orleans. Their budgets are $22 million or $23 million for a year, compared to ours, which is around $15-16 (million) that we have to make up just to be equal with them, and we're a bigger parish," Moore said.

The District Attorney's office adopted a budget for 2026 that decreased by around $775,000. The added funding will help make up for it, but Moore says it still won't help them through the end of the year.