Courtesy of the Florida Bar News
Legislators working to reduce the state budget by more than $1 billion trimmed it down some — but not too much — from the state court system’s funding when they concluded a special budget cutting legislative session last month.
When it was all over, the courts gave up about 2 percent of their funding or $6.8 million, according to State Courts Administrator Lisa Goodner. That was less than the originally anticipated 4 percent reductions the courts were told to expect and far below the 10 percent cuts Gov. Charlie Crist asked all state agencies and branches to prepare for.
“The legislative leadership responded very favorably to the cuts we proposed for the third branch,” Chief Justice Fred Lewis said. “I think everyone recognized that our proposals were a fair and reasonable response to the state’s budgetary problems.”
Chief Justice Lewis said the reductions will result in “some serious cuts” on the administrative side of court operations while minimizing the impact on case dispositions as much as possible.
“It really is more of a scaling back of administrative activities,” Goodner said.
Utility bills, money spent on Supreme Court committee support, state travel, and official business are the types of expenditures that will be impacted. Goodner said the district courts of appeal are set to reduce their operating budgets, collectively affecting their general operating expenses.
“These are things we can do, certainly, but I don’t want anybody to get the impression that we have so much money in the branch that when we make reductions nobody feels it, because that’s not the case,” Goodner said, adding the court started out with a “very lean budget.”
“At one point we were up to 4.2 [percent] with some of the earlier numbers, but we came down quite a bit — our cuts came in the more manageable 2 percent range,” she said.
Thirteenth Circuit State Attorney Mark Ober, president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said state attorneys in all 20 circuits also felt the pinch.
The budget cuts for the state attorneys amounted to a little less than $6 million.
“It was in the high fives,” said Dick Donahoe, executive director for Ober’s office and who worked on the budget issue. “About $5.5 million statewide.”
“Were we happy with it? No,” Ober said. “But it could have been worse.”
Compared to other agencies, Donahoe said, the state attorneys came out very well.
“We would’ve preferred no cut at all, but we understand the position the state’s in and the state was very cooperative in minimizing the impact to our organizations,” Donahoe said.
“The budgets of the state attorneys are 95.4 percent — that’s a statewide average — salary and benefits,” said Donahoe, adding the legislature is “allowing us to take our cuts in whatever bucket — be it in salary and benefits or operations — that a particular circuit is comfortable with.”
“That’s a benefit to us,” Ober added. “We appreciated them doing that because they’ve given us the autonomy to run our individual offices as we see fit.”
Eighth Circuit Public Defender Rick Parker, president of the Florida Public Defender Association, said the PDs’ budget cuts came in at about $5 million. Parker said some circuits took heavier hits than others, but the pinch will be felt statewide. The bulk of those reductions were taken from their operating budgets.
As for the courts, “These cuts were done to minimize the disruption to services, and I think we can feel pretty confident that we have minimized any impact on case processing within the court system,” Goodner said. “We’ve protected those resources.”
Goodner said the trial courts — where the largest portion of the court budget goes — were able to make a lot of their adjustments through shifts to trust funds.
The trial courts did, however, have to give up their contingency funds, typically used to cover unanticipated shortfalls for payment of due process services like court reporters, expert witnesses, and court interpreters — “things that the courts are required to provide for indigent litigants,” Goodner said.
“That contingency fund no longer exists,” Goodner said, adding, however, that sounds worse than it actually is. “While we always want to be able to plan for contingencies, the courts have never had to access that contingency fund in the years since Revision 7 was implemented. We felt it was one of the things that we could sacrifice in this economic situation.”
Budget cuts also mean managing reductions in the form of money available for paying civil traffic infraction hearing officers. The courts also gave up funding for 10 of the 20 new case managers the legislature had recently authorized.
Other reductions came from court travel budgets and expenditures.
“We’ve cancelled a lot of travel,” Goodner said. “We had a trial court chief judges meeting that was canceled; DCA meetings have been cancelled and held via video conference or by telephone instead of face-to-face in order to conserve our dollars.”
Goodner said her office worked closely with legislative members and their staffs to minimize the financial impact on the courts.
“We’re particularly grateful for the leadership that Rep. [Dick] Kravitz [R-Orange Park] and Sen. [Victor] Crist [R-Tampa] exerted in terms of protecting the third branch,” she said.