by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
If the devil is truly in the details, the clerk of court’s office has had a wickedly stressful time since the first of the year, updating all the fees that will change July 1.
“It is a huge, huge undertaking,” said Clerk of Court Jim Fuller. “We’re trying very hard to make this a smooth transition.
“Will there be any bumps in the road? There probably will be. And we’ll have to look at every one of them and kind of see what’s going on.”
As the result of a Constitutional amendment approved in 1998, the State will take over funding the court system on July 1.
To collect money to keep the system running, Florida’s 67 counties are raising service and processing fees in circuit civil, county civil, probate/guardianship and marriage license.
“We’re trying to make all the attorneys aware, and we’re handing out the changes to individuals so the filers themselves will know the changes going on,” said Fuller.
Laying the groundwork for the changes began with considerable intensity around the first of the year, Fuller said. The final numbers couldn’t be published until Gov. Jeb Bush signed the bill, which he did on May 28.
Internal Auditor Tom Hiers “has been working 24/7 to figure out all the changes,” said Fuller. “He and Michael Connelly, our finance guy, have done great jobs putting all the stuff together.
“We didn’t know what the legislature was actually going to pass, so we’ve been working with the stuff we knew was going to happen. These guys put in a lot of work.”
Municipalities will submit their budgets to a special state committee for review. The budgets then will be forwarded to State Treasurer Tom Gallagher.
The excess that larger counties collect will be put in a trust fund to help smaller counties whose fee collections fall short.
Putting all the changes together, and trying not to overlook any, was made more difficult because the fee references are “scattered all over the statutes,” Hiers said.
“It’s taken quite a bit of time, but, in the grand scheme of things, I guess it’s not that big a deal,” he said. “It’s been verifying, verifying and reverifying. Because once we put it out there, someone, somewhere is going to be unhappy and want to argue with us about it.”
The way traffic citations will be handled during the changeover gives a hint of the potential for aggravation.
A driver who gets a ticket over the next two weeks will pay a lower price — and the fine will stay here — if it’s handled before July 1. If the ticket is paid after July 1, the county and the state will divide the amount.
“But how do we distribute the money?” Fuller asked. “The distribution will be different than it is today.
“So we’re having a little bit of growing pains, but we’ll make it happen.”
The whole process has been a reminder to be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
“For this thing to get through, it took a lot of money and a lot of lobbying on the parts of all the counties” fed up with unfunded mandates, said Chief Assistant Gordon Morgan. “They got it done. And now they wish they hadn’t.”
“The counties thought they were going to get to keep all the the money the State was giving them, and the State was going to come up with more money to fund the courts,” Fuller added. “The State said, ‘You don’t want to fund the courts anymore? That’s not a problem. By the way, we’re taking back all the money we give you.’
“Now the counties are going, ‘Oh, man, what did we do?’ ”
Though some counties, primarily the smaller ones, will be in for a tough time, “Our county is one where it’s going to work out,” Fuller predicted. “I think it’s going to be all right.
“We’ve worked on it with the legislature for a couple of years, and the cities and counties have worked on it. But it is a big change. It’s not a little change.”