Court system leadership may be fairly silent about this election-year budget deal, but the people actually dealing with ongoing shortfalls are starting to figure out that they were left out. Take child welfare courts, for example, where officials had expected modest increases, as noted in the Chronicle of Social Change website: “The California State Assembly and Senate had both signed off on a modest pot of money earmarked to help children’s legal representatives reduce caseloads that have grown to more than 400 children per lawyer in some counties… the state would have doled out $11 million in funding over the next year to help lower caseloads in child-welfare courts, followed by $22 million in the second year and $33 million in the third year. However, that money vanished in the final version of the budget that was sent to the Gov. Jerry Brown (D) for approval on Sunday [June 15].

 

You can hear discontent rising, but we are told many individual operations are being told to hold their fire because they might be among those lucky few getting some of the modest increases. But as those promises fade, it will be interesting to see what happens. Read some reaction here: California Rejects Bid to Restore Funding for Child Welfare Courts