Be Alarmed, Be Very Alarmed

The Sacramento-based Capitol Weekly, which focuses on state government, is quoting the chief of California’s Senate Judiciary Committee sounding an alarm. “We should all be alarmed. Every single one of us,” says Sen. Noreen Evans, who chairs the committee. The newspaper outlines some of the impacts of budget cutting: “Resolving a divorce, a custody tussle, a contract dispute, a landlord tenant fight, an unpaid debt or any number of multimillion-dollar or small claims civil issues takes longer and costs more than it used to.”
 
And the Weekly adds some numbers we’ve not seen before. After reporting that a day in court will become “… even more time-consuming, experts say, because of the steady diet of state budget cuts force fed to the courts in California, the nation’s largest judicial system” the story notes that “… since June of 2009, the state general fund’s share of the court’s $3.1 billion budget has fallen from 56 percent to 20 percent.
 

The story is written by Greg Lucas, who is a contributing editor of the Weekly but also host of TV’s “Politics on Tap” that shows on the California Channel. Read the story here.