by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Due to a large and unexpected budget cut being proposed by City Council, four Duval County legal programs are now scrambling to find funding for the remainder of the year and one may be on the road to extinction.
Since July 2004, the Duval County Law Library, the adult and juvenile drug courts and Jacksonville Area Legal Aid have all been receiving equal amounts of money allocated from a $65 additional assessment court cost attached to criminal cases. Last week, the programs’ directors found out that the source for the budgeted money hasn’t panned out due to insufficient fee collections.
Though the funding pullback seems hasty, City Council member and Finance Committee chair Reggie Fullwood said the council is working to find new funding for the programs.
“There are enough members of this council that understand how important these programs are,” Fullwood said. “We are currently looking for ways to fill this hole in the budget but, as you can imagine, there are always a lot of holes to fill.”
Fullwood said the planners of the $65 court cost fee were behind in their assessment of what the fee would generate and the council should have some new funding suggestions within the next few weeks.
This funding cut has meant severe operational changes and near disaster for most of the programs. The Duval County Law Library seems to have taken the hardest hit.
Bud Maurer, director of the law library, said he quickly had to cut back on its hours of operation and had to lay off eight part-time employees as a direct result, but that might not be all.
“It looks pretty bad,” he said.
Luckily for Maurer and the law library’s continued operation, the library is in control of a trust fund that was part of a previous funding program, which was replaced when the $65 court cost funding program went into effect. The trust fund remained and has acted as a safety blanket for the library but the blanket is about to wear very thin.
“Had I not had that fund balance, we may not have been able to continue,” Maurer said.
Though the library is able to remain operational, Maurer said its future existence is reasonably questionable if the budget cut is approved.
The adult and juvenile drug courts also took a big hit from the hasty funding cut. Drug court is a program that helps people with substance abuse problems and non-violent, drug-related crimes to get long-term drug rehabilitation instead of jail time.
Joe Stelma, chief deputy court administrator and drug court coordinator, said if the budget gap is not filled quickly, it will have a major affect on his programs because many of the program’s participants are currently in the middle of their drug rehabilitation treatments.
“We have literally hundreds of adults, family members and juveniles in treatment right now,” Stelma said. “This is something that is very frustrating but we have to manage it because we have so many people in the middle of their treatments and you can’t just back out on them.”
Stelma said Gateway Community Services and River Region Human Services, the two facilities that treat drug court participants, have agreed to work through this budgetary dry spell but doesn’t know how long they will be able to.
Stelma also would have had to make some layoffs but he said the City helped out by picking up his two case managers.
“That would have been a big loss,” he said.
Jacksonville Area Legal Aid was also affected and Executive Director Michael Figgins said he is equally disappointed by the budget problem.
“The problem is that this money was appropriated in October,” Figgins said, “so we have been spending money that we may or may not have now. We have been living with the expectation that the money would be there. The result is that some things could be cut, like services, and that would not be good for the community.”