While Florida courts may only be asked to make a 4.2 percent budget cut as opposed to 10 percent, such a reduction could still have significant effects on courts and citizens’ ability to seek redress, according to State Courts Administrator Lisa Goodner.
“Constitutionally, there are certain things that we have to provide and you can’t go too far in cutting our budget without endangering that constitutional function,” Goodner said. “Our budgets are to a large degree made up of salaries for judges and support staff.”
At the direction of Gov. Charlie Crist, Senate President Ken Pruitt, and House Speaker Marco Rubio, the courts (as did state agencies) projected how they would cut their budgets by 10 percent to help make up a $1 billion expected shortfall in state revenues. After reporting to legislative committees on that, legislative leaders in the Senate Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations Committee announced the actual cut will be around 4.2 percent.
Goodner said that’s much better than 10 percent, but still probably higher than the courts’ can sustain without affecting citizens’ access to the courts and the ability of courts to handle rising caseloads. The goal of the court system in making cuts is to preserve citizen access and maintain efficient handling of cases, she said.
The court is seeking to avoid cuts to judges or the staff that helps them carry out their adjudicatory functions, she said. But that goal also carries ancillary effects.
As an example, she said for the state’s five district courts of appeal, 88.5 percent of the budgets is for judges and staff that supports their adjudicatory function. That means a 4.2 percent reduction has to come out of the remaining 11.5 percent of the budget — a nearly impossible goal.
And it’s important to keep the number of judges and support staff because since 2002, the number of appeals filed with the DCAs has risen more than 5 percent and at the same time no new judges have been approved for those courts, according to court statistics.
“We can’t look across our entire budget for these cuts; We have to protect the adjudicatory functions,” Goodner said. “If you protect those resources — and we think we have to — then the cuts have a disproportionate effect on the rest of your budget.”
Added Brenda Johnson, director of Community and Intergovernmental Relations for the court system: “What these budget cuts are doing is they are basically going into the foundation of the third branch of government. We don’t have programs like agencies do.”
Lawmakers have seemed sympathetic that a 4.2 percent reduction would affect the direct adjudicatory function of the DCAs and the Supreme Court. But Goodner said it’s also important for the courts to show that such a cut would hurt the trial courts.
For example, if judges and staff are to be protected, making the 4.2 percent cut would require eliminating all of the traffic court hearing officers in the state, she said. County court judges would have to pick up that burden, and while on paper the state would save money, the efficiency of the courts would be hurt, Goodner said.
The 4.2 percent reduction would actually reduce the overall court budget below its funding level for the 2006-07 fiscal year, she said. It would also undercut the goal of the Revision 7 constitutional amendment implemented in 2004 to have all the courts in the state offer equal services and access to justice.
Overall, the 2007-08 budget for the courts is $491.2 million. The 4.2 percent reduction figure, if applied across the board, would require cutting $395,143 from the Supreme Court budget, $545,042 from the Office of the State Courts Administrator, $1.7 million from the district courts of appeal, and $15.5 million from the trial courts.
One change being suggested by Goodner’s office is to transfer per diem, meal, and lodging payments for jurors from the state court system to local court clerks. That would save the courts around $4.7 million,
Other possible cuts include reductions in personnel for drug courts, mediation programs, and case management services. Any of those, according to court figures, would slow down the ability of the state’s trial courts to handle cases, which in turn means delays for citizens using the court system.
Court figures also show that the budget reductions are coming at a time when courts are handling more cases than ever. Cases involving children and families have risen 8 percent in the past decade, felony filings rose 10 percent from fiscal year 2004-05 to 2005-06, and county courts saw an 18 percent increase in filings for the same period.
All of that means, Goodner said, is that, “When you cut so deeply, the impact to the citizens of the state is not a good one.”
— Courtesy of the Florida Bar News