by The Florida Bar News
Florida courts and court-related agencies find themselves in a delicate position as the Florida Legislature begins a second special session to deal with the state’s budget crisis.
On the one hand, the court, state attorneys, and public defenders took some difficult budget cuts in the first special session but nothing that would slice into vital operations.
But that budget has now gone by the wayside, and lawmakers are scheduled to meet again from Nov. 27 through Dec. 6 to make even deeper spending reductions. And while the first special session may have shown that lawmakers are sensitive to the needs of the justice system, that’s no guarantee painful budget cutbacks aren’t coming.
“We’re all sitting on pins and needles and as agency heads, we’re trying to avoid a mass exodus because there is a lot of apprehension among the staff,” said Fifth Circuit Public Defender Skip Babb, president of the Florida Public Defenders Association. “We came out relatively well [in the first special session] with a small reduction to meet our already overburdened dockets. We’re cautiously optimistic that we have gotten the message across we are very efficient as we are already, and as a public
safety issue we are hoping the cuts will be minimal.”
Third Circuit State Attorney Jerry Blair, president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said the budget from the first special session would have minimized and possibly eliminated the furloughs and layoffs some state attorneys feared would result from deep cuts.
“Our cuts . . . amounted to about 1.7 percent of our general revenue, and they also gave us some flexibility to do fund shifts and do trust fund shifts to replace the lost general revenue,” Blair said. “I think most offices would have been able to get by with minimal furloughs and probably no layoffs.
“We’re obviously holding our breath on the next round.”
The main problem for state attorneys — as well as public defenders — is that 95 percent of their state funding goes for salaries. “If you make any significant cuts, it has to come out of payroll, either in layoffs or furloughs,” Blair said.
Ironically, he said prosecutors may have benefited from recent crime statistics which showed the number of arrests has risen. “Significant cuts in the criminal justice system were not a real wise thing with arrests increasing about 9.2 percent,” Blair noted.
Deputy State Courts Administrator Lisa Goodner said it may be harder for the courts to do better in the second special session than they did in the first.
In the initial session, the Senate and House had greatly different budgets, with the Senate making much smaller cuts, totaling about $800 million. The House wound up accepting that unchanged as part of a strategy to prevent a delay in a scheduled intangible tax cut, which was sought by the Senate but opposed by the lower chamber.
A delay in that cut was scheduled to come up in the second session as part of a compromise between the two chambers. The goal for the next session is about $1 billion in cuts.
The budget approved in the first special session cut about $28 million of the trial courts’ budget that would have come from general state revenues and then replaced about $25 million with trust funds.
“So you’re talking about $3 million in actual cuts,” Goodner said. “There were 33 positions that would be eliminated in the trial courts.”
That compared with 188.5 positions that were cut in the House’s tentative spending plan that never came up for a vote.
“The House took a 7.5 percent reduction, and the bill did not specify where the positions would be taken from, with some exceptions,” Goodner said.
Both the House and Senate would have cut 28 new positions in the 2001-02 budget for the Guardian Ad Litem program that were never filled, she said.
Aside from the trial courts, the district courts of appeal saw reductions in their law library and fixed capital expenditures, and the Fourth DCA’s mediation program was eliminated, Goodner said.
At the Supreme Court, most of the cuts came from the Office of the State Courts Administrator. The Senate proposal did not actually reduce positions, while the House bill cut 10. Money was cut for the expenses of Supreme Court committees, among other functions, she said.
In the new session, the House and Senate may take their original positions as starting points, Goodner said, adding, “I just consider that we are beginning a new process when they come back after Thanksgiving and all these issues will be debated again.”
— Reprinted with permission of The Florida Bar News.