The public part of the state budget debates is held during the “June gloom” season because the state constitution “requires” the legislature to pass the budget by June 15, a deadline that has been seldom met (we went 23 of 24 years missing it, but passed it on time last year), and never with any real consequence. As a budget expert with Gov. Schwarzenegger famously put it: “If you do something bad and you never get punished for it, then you don’t see it as being bad anymore.”
What seems a sure bet, reading between the lines, is that ongoing talks will find some additional money for the courts, but how much and where it goes will doubtless remain a mystery until the very end – that’s not going to sit well with critics who say one problem is lack of a public process. But the context is being set by events like the recent conference call when a former Shasta County Superior Court judge said that families facing breakups in Shasta now face a three-month wait for a permanent custody and visitation order.
What seems likely is that the next wave of cuts will hit in the coming weeks and June will find a full-on crisis in front of the “real” deadline, the next fiscal year that begins July 1. Read more about the context of courts cuts at the state’s bar association website.
