The Travis County District Attorney’s Public Integrity Unit will shrink, but it will live another year. That’s after local funding kicked in on Oct. 1 to replace the expired state funding that Gov. Rick Perry vetoed in June.

Travis County commissioners on Sept. 24 voted 3-2 to approve a 2014 budget, including $1.81 million for the unit. Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg also contributed $734,422 from the DA’s office’s Forfeited Property Account. The commissioners voted unanimously to notify most of the unit’s employees that they are no longer subject to a “reduction in force.”

Just two forensic analysts will lose their jobs, which is fewer layoffs than first expected. Although state law gives the unit statewide venue to prosecute certain insurance and tax-fraud offenses, the leaner unit will no longer accept statewide cases, instead focusing on prosecuting offenses that occur in Travis County.

Lehmberg says she’s happy the county is funding the unit instead of the state.

“I will absolutely consider going back to the Legislature for funding of things that involve the loss of state property and the like. But I want to take a look at how many of those cases involve officials, because I would like to have a discussion about avoiding the political football,” she says — “[t]he political debate that we go through every two years, and have for as long as I remember, about who is getting investigated and who got prosecuted and what party they happened to belong to.”

Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe says about the need for the county funding, “I regret that it happened. I wish it had not, but it did. I think we responded in the only reasonable manner we could. Those cases didn’t go away because funding did.”

No one at the Governor’s Press Office immediately returned a telephone call seeking comment.

Metamorphosis

The $2.55 million in local funding is much less than the state funding — of $3.74 million for 2014 and $3.83 million in 2015 — that Perry vetoed, noting he wouldn’t support the funding when the person in charge of the unit had “lost the public’s confidence.” Lehmberg was convicted of driving while intoxicated in April.