by The Florida Bar News
With a prediction of poorer and slower services to litigants and fewer services for children caught up in the court system, Florida judges, prosecutors, and defenders are bracing for the outcome of the special legislative session to address the state’s budget shortfall.
Even before the session, called to address an estimated $1.3-billion revenue deficit, courts and related agencies were cutting back and planning for possible further budget reductions.
In a Sept. 26 memo to chief judges, Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Wells ordered a halt to all hiring, except for judicial assistants, and a moratorium on purchases of equipment and office furniture. In turn, Wells was asked by the House and Senate appropriations committees to identify how the court budget could be cut by five percent. Trial courts also began coping with cutbacks in state programs that affect their operations, such as not having probation officers in every courtroom.
And state attorneys and public defenders are grappling with the real possibility of furloughing employees and not being able to handle their caseloads.
The problem, say many court officials, is their budgets are mostly salaries with little other spending, and any cuts mean reductions in service.
“We don’t have much wiggle room,” said Skip Babb, Fifth Circuit public defender and president of the Florida Public Defenders Association. “We don’t anticipate a five or seven or 10 percent cut in arrests or informations filed or people charged with capital crimes and facing the death penalty. Our caseloads are already overloaded. We’re in quite a dilemma. We have a constitutional responsibility to do this work, and we’re already busting at the seams.”
The budget problems began last summer when the nation’s economic sluggishness led to a decline in state income. Gov. Jeb Bush sent out letters to state agencies, including the courts and related agencies, asking them to begin finding ways to cut spending. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks put a further dent in state revenues, because of a decline in sales taxes collected from tourists.
State experts estimated on Oct. 15 that the shortfall would be around $1.3 billion for the current budget year and $1.7 billion for next year. Aside from Bush’s efforts and his call for a special session, the Senate Appropriations Committee and the House Fiscal Responsibility Council sent letters to all state departments, including judicial branch agencies, asking them how they would cut their budgets by five percent.
A spokesman for the Senate committee said that is not an indication the legislature will make an across-the-board five-percent cut, but the information will help lawmakers figure out where to make cuts, both in the special session and in next year’s regular session which will draw up the 2002-03 budget.
“I see no alternative but to impose a hiring freeze on all positions in the branch, with the one exception of judicial assistants,” Chief Justice Wells wrote in his memo to chief circuit judges. “Additionally, I am imposing a moratorium on the purchase of equipment or furniture. I also encourage you to make every effort to limit travel in your court and to curtail other routine expenditures.”
While that memo was going out, Wells was also working on the reply to the legislative budgeting panels on how the courts could cut five percent of their budgets.
His letter noted that the courts have a constitutional duty to provide access for all people to “a functioning and efficient court system.”
“[M]y first response to you is that the judicial branch cannot meet your target of a five-percent reduction in the recurring current budget without serious harm to the courts’ constitutional responsibility,” Wells wrote.
He recommended that no judgeships be cut and that none of the judgeships approved by the legislature earlier this year effective Jan. 2 be delayed. Wells said if any programs were cut, it should be ones that benefit only local areas and statewide programs should be spared. He went on to say there were savings that could be made in the court budget by forgoing new funding in the 2001-02 budget and curtailing other programs, including the foster care review program in Duval County.
The situation may be even more critical for state attorneys and public defenders. Of their state budgets, 95 percent or so goes directly to salaries.
“We have been affected,” said Third Circuit State Attorney Jerry Blair, president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association. “Our [association] Education Committee met last week and we have eliminated some seminars.
“Virtually every state attorney office has implemented a policy limiting travel for training and other purposes,” he said. “For all intents and purposes, out-of-state travel has been eliminated by all of the offices.”
Further cuts “are ultimately going to have to come out of dollars that were intended for salaries,” Blair added. “That will come either from furloughs or layoffs.”
The timing, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, also couldn’t be worse, he said. “With all of the emphasis on public safety, I don’t think local law enforcement agencies will be cutting back on their activities. Most of these cases are going to be in the state system, and we’re going to be allocating fewer state resources to deal with them.”
Babb, the Florida Public Defenders Association president, agreed. He said with U.S. attorneys offices likely devoting more time to anti-terrorism cases, other cases are likely to wind up in state courts.
“We have 95 percent of our budget statewide in salaries,” he said. “And we anticipate if we have to take substantial cuts, we’ll have to tell people on our staffs, ‘Here’s the work and it’s increasing, but we don’t want you to come to work a couple days a month.’”
Like state attorneys, public defenders have also cut training costs, and Babb said he’s concerned that, with ever more complex laws, there will be more errors that will lead to appellate courts ordering new trials.
Another worry, Babb said, is last year, with Gov. Bush’s support, the legislature approved salary boosts for public defender and state attorney staff. That was important because of high attorney turnover as private sector pay rose and public sector compensation failed to keep pace. Those increases are scheduled to go into effect in January — unless they are cut as part of the budget crisis.
Those incentives, Babb said, helped both recruit new attorneys and retain existing ones. “We are anticipating that if that is . . . withdrawn, the legal staffs in public service are going to see a mass exit,” he said.
“And that affects public safety.”
—Reprinted with permission of The Florida Bar News.