court rationing

Presiding Judge: Justice Rationing To Continue

June 24, 2014 By CCM Staff

Los Angeles Superior Court Presiding Judge David Wesley say the just-passed California budget will not require additional staff reductions, but will also not replace previous cutbacks. The judge is being quoted in published reports saying that “… the California courts have suffered five years of reductions in state funding, and many courts have reduced their workforces by as much as one-quarter, with no lessening of their statutory and constitutional obligations. We are being forced to ration access to justice.

He added that “… people trying to do the right thing and pay a traffic ticket, find themselves stymied by long lines and antiquated technology… crime victims, and the law enforcement officers acting as witnesses in their cases, are burdened with long travel times because the local courthouse was closed.”

Read his comments at KHTS News: Court Officials Decry Budget, Say Delays Will Continue

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: California Budget, california court cuts, california courts, California State Budget, civil court, court budget, court rationing, Judge David Wesley

Budget Losers Now Learning The Score

June 18, 2014 By CCM Staff

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

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: California Budget, california court cuts, california courts, California State Budget, child lawyers, child welfare, civil court, court rationing, juvenile courts, juvenile justice

Courts Budget Too Little, Too Wait

June 17, 2014 By CCM Staff

Those long wait times and delayed justice are not likely to go away anytime soon, given this year’s state budget focus on Gov. Brown’s bullet train project and increased education funding, say the early reviews of the just-passed spending plan. Says The Courthouse News: “… [the] $156 billion budget California lawmakers passed Sunday gave a $40 million boost to courthouse construction, but fell far short of the $266 million the judiciary hoped to raise for the trial courts this year… Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye unveiled in January a “budget blueprint” for the courts that set a $1.2 billion funding goal over the next three years, with $266 million more needed this year just to stay afloat.

Also from TCN: “We are nowhere near adequate funding of the [justice] system and nowhere even their own treading water mark, and that’s unfortunate,” Assemblyman Jeff Gorell, R-Camarillo, said on Sunday. “This budget simply does not focus on the priorities that Californians have set.”

What’s less clear is what political price, if any, lawmakers will pay for putting the courts on the budget back-burner.

See the story here: Courthouse News Service

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: california court cuts, california courts, California Courts Budget, California Rail, California State Budget, California Train, civil court, court cuts, court rationing, Gov. Jerry Brown

After Fed Court Ruling, ICE Detainee Requests Go Unheeded

June 6, 2014 By CCM Staff

Reflecting on the fact that many immigration detentions are civil, rather than criminal, actions, more than 100 jurisdictions across the United States have stopped enforcing “holds” issued by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. The policy changes follow a federal court ruling in Oregon declaring such practices unconstitutional.

More than a dozen of the counties changing the practice are in California, including Los Angeles and San Diego, where authorities have stopped complying with the ICE detainer requests, reports the Orange County Register. The newspaper quotes Julia Harumi Mass, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California: “Detaining people based on suspected civil immigration violations without probable cause not only wastes scarce local public safety resources and contradicts our sense of fairness – it undeniably violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

Read the Register report by Roxana Kopetman here.

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, National Tagged With: ACLU, civil court, court rationing, ICE, ICE detainer requests, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Legal news

Budget Analysis Continues

May 16, 2014 By CCM Staff

Gov. Brown’s “May revision” budget continues to draw attention and analysis, and the Sacramento Business Journal has a good take on how the spending plan pushes court finding issues past November’s election cycle. The BizJournal reports that “… the proposed budget revise points to a new workload-based funding model to allocate money where most needed. The document also expresses support for a two-year strategy to court stabilization that takes time to evaluate and modernize court operations.”

Then it adds: Yet “the administration has been clear that state-funded entities should not expect restorations of reductions — moving forward, government has to be done differently,” the section of the budget summary on the judicial branch reads. That is likely to disappoint labor leaders who hoped some of the nearly 4,000 jobs eliminated over the past years might be reclaimed. Read the BizJournal story here:

California’s trial courts get more money in state budget, but not enough to maintain status quo – Sacramento Business Journal

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: California Budget, california court cuts, california courts, California State Budget, civil court, court rationing, Gov. Jerry Brown

Brown Budget Targets Employee Pensions

May 15, 2014 By CCM Staff

Court-community reviews of Gov. Brown’s new budget are mixed, with state Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye terming it “encouraging” in a statement but labor advocates worried about plans to increase court employees contributions to their pensions. Meanwhile, along with a $60 million increase from his previous plans, Gov. Brown is framing the budget as a two-year process, meaning some real decisions might come after his Nov. re-election bid.

CCM staff photo

Discussions are no doubt being held to figure out what the next four weeks will bring. But the Contra Costa Times is among those noting lawmaker support for more courts funding, reporting that “… the chief justice had backing from state legislators, who recently proposed restoring more than $200 million in court funding in the upcoming budget year. Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, and the judiciary committee chairman, said Brown’s courts budget is still ‘far short’ of the hundreds of millions of dollars it needs to handle its caseloads and keep courthouses open and running.”

Missing from the discussion so far: re-opening any of the closed courts or re-hiring any of the nearly 4,000 court workrs laid off over the past few years.

Read the CC Times report here: California courts get a boost in governor’s budget.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: AFSCME, CA Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, California, California Budget, california court cuts, california courts, court rationing, Gov. Jerry Brown, pensions, SEIU, union

More Courts Charging Fees For Online Records

May 14, 2014 By CCM Staff

More California courts are joining Los Angeles in charging people to look at civil court records online, raising concerns among some public access groups and others. Starting April 23, Alameda County Superior Court charges $1 for each of the first five pages of a civil court record downloaded online, with the cost dropping to 50 per page after that and capped at $40 total.

Los Angeles Superior Court fees start $4.75 for each record searched. Teresa Ruano, spokeswoman for the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts, says that “… there’s a budget crisis in the courts. Revenue is part of the solution, a small part of the solution.”

You can read the AP story in the Greenfield Reporter here.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: California, california court cuts, california courts, civil court, court rationing, Legal news

Budget Advisory Group Holding Thursday Call

May 6, 2014 By CCM Staff

The public can listen into the next meeting of California’s Trial Budget Advisory Committee meeting via a conference call, officials announced. The meeting will discuss “ongoing budget issues plaguing the state’s courts,” according to published accounts, and will focus on court interpreter funding and proposed revisions to some tech project allocations.

The meeting is open to the public via conference call. The meeting will also be audiocast live. More information is available here: Trial Court Budget Advisory Committee – judicial_council.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: budget, California, California Budget, california court cuts, court rationing, governmental accountability, Judges, Justice Rationing, open meetings, transparency

Chief Justice Continues Funding Push

May 5, 2014 By CCM Staff

The “Tani tour” continues, and California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye may be warning wealthy communities, that may have been spared extreme court cuts so far, that their services might soon suffer from a lack of funding. That’s because new state spending formulas take population into consideration, so slow-growth communities will feel the pain.

That talking point emerged at the Marin County Civic Center where, the Marin Independent Journal reports, “… Cantil-Sakauye described the judiciary as desperately underfunded, having been forced to cut about $1 billion since the economic downturn began around 2008. The cuts have forced the closure of 51 courthouses in the system, even as it struggles to digest 7.5 million new cases a year in a state of 38 million people speaking scores of languages.”

After the statewide message, Kim Turner, executive director of Marin Superior Court, “… said Marin has fared better than other counties because its population has not exploded. But she said Marin stands to lose money as court funding is spread to counties in dire shape.”

“It’s going to hurt,” Turner said, as quoted by the Independent Journal. “It’s going to require some belt-tightening.”

You can read the full story here.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: California, California Budget, california court cuts, california courts, California State Budget, California Superior Court, civil court, court rationing, Justice Rationing, shared sacrifice

Kansas Latest To Tie Cash To Judicial ‘Reform’

April 14, 2014 By CCM Staff

Kansas, like California, is following the national trend to tie state judicial reform to funding, leading the Wichita Eagle to editorialize against the changes as eroding court independence. The newspaper writes that “Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton R. Nuss warned this was coming, objecting in an Eagle commentary last month to ‘the diffusion of the unified court system’s centralized authority in exchange for money to keep courts open.’

The funding-linked legislation, pending a decision by Gov. Sam Brownback, would allow the chief judge of each of the state’s 31 judicial districts to submit and control his own budget. The Eagle fears that “… the new legislation also allows judges to select the chief judge for their own district court, further eroding the Supreme Court’s authority.”

You can read a detailed argument on the Kansas argument here.

Filed Under: Community, National Tagged With: court budget, court rationing, judicial reform, Legal news, Supreme Court