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July 4, 2009 |
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| January 05, 2009 |
By: Billy Shields |
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ust six months into her tenure as the head of the state’s highest court, Chief Florida Supreme Court Justice Peggy Quince strolled across Duval Street in Tallahassee to speak with members of the Legislature.
The topic: the state courts budget. The audience: the House Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations Committee.
Her message was clear. Don’t touch the justice system. It had already done its part to help close the state’s widening budget gap.
Armed with figures from the Office of the State Courts Administrator, Quince declared that if state lawmakers cut another 10 percent from the courts system’s $400 million-plus budget, it would cost 556 employee positions and 23 furlough days. “The court system budget is only 0.7 percent of the state budget, a small amount to be paid to honor fundamental expectations of government,” Quince said.
But when a special session of the Legislature convenes today to explore ways to close a $2 billion shortfall in Florida’s budget, the justice system will again be expected to be a candidate in another round of cuts.
The legal community worries Florida lawmakers could take another 10 percent “holdback” slice from the state court system’s coffers. Lobbyists warn that this year legislators are looking almost everywhere for places to make cuts, and that little will be beyond the range of the Legislature’s knife.
“We are in a full-fledged budget crisis, and our justice system is becoming very close to a non-performing system,” said Dan Gelber, a Democratic state senator whose district includes eastern Miami-Dade County and a patch of southern Broward County. A former federal prosecutor, Gelber is of counsel at Akerman Senterfitt in Miami and serves on the Legislature’s ways and means committee.
“It’s really close to that critical point where it’s the equivalent of a denial of justice,” Gelber said of the courts system. “The saving grace is that it’s such a small piece of the budget that we might be able to fully fund it. “We shouldn’t be cannibalizing it.”
But not everyone is sold on the theory that court budgets are sacrosanct and thus immune from more sacrifice.
Sen. J.D. Alexander, the Republican chairman of the ways and means committee, said that standardization and maximizing revenue are objectives courts need to bear in mind as budget talks move forward.
“Some courts could adopt better practices for cost savings, like staffing ratios, procedures for collections,” he said. He represents a district that includes the bulk of Okeechobee County and other counties north of Lake Okeechobee.
“I’m told that a number of clerks of courts don’t have the same collection efforts. When we’re searching for every dollar that could be another dollar we put to vocational programs, handicapped programs and programs for seniors, I get serious about wanting to do everything we can to maximize every dollar,” he said. That said, he reiterated that preserving the criminal justice system must be at the top of any legislative agenda.
State attorney’s offices, public defender offices and their statewide associations are all expected to have their own lobbyists in Tallahassee during the session. The stated purpose of the special session is to fix the current fiscal year’s budget shortfall. The economic downturn triggered by the bust of the real estate boom has caused a budget shortfall that the governor’s office pegs at $2.3 billion.
Potential solutions Gelber cited include canceling sales tax exemptions on some airplane parts, newspaper inserts and skybox arena event tickets.
One potential solution Gelber mentioned — raising sin taxes like cigarette taxes — already is off the table after Senate President Jeff Atwater and House Speaker Ray Sansom, both Republicans, expressly excluded them from consideration in a follow-up statement issued last week.
The schedule of the session — right after the New Year’s holiday — means that prognosticating lobbyists are struggling to figure out what direction the budget cuts will take. Many lawmakers were out of town the week before, meaning they had little chance to vet the opinions of their colleagues before a session with important ramifications begins, said Aventura-based lobbyist Ron Book, who represents the governments of Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
When asked what could happen at the session, Book replied, “My answer today could be very different a week from now. At this moment in time nobody has taken any of the Article V court system issues off the table, and I don’t know that it will happen,” he said, referring to the article of the Florida Constitution that governs the courts system. Book is also a lawyer. “Everybody’s sort of in the tank together.”
One ray of light for the courts system that broke last week was a joint announcement by Atwater and Sansom that increased court fees, fines and assessments against criminals are on the table as a possible avenue of keeping the courts whole, Book said.
It’s a move legislators have made before. Last spring Florida lawmakers raised a host of court user fees by a total of $135 million in an effort to raise revenue. The cost of filing an eviction, for instance, jumped from $75 to $295. But members of the judiciary and lawyers nonetheless are bracing for the worst.
Other statewide findings Justice Quince cited in her December committee testimony included that from FY 2005-06 to FY 2007-08:
• Capital murders increased by 24 percent.
• Condominium cases increased by 435 percent.
• Foreclosures increased by 396 percent.
“We have a financial crisis that is threatening to become a constitutional crisis,” said state Rep. Perry Thurston, a Broward Democrat and attorney whose district includes Fort Lauderdale, Plantation, Lauderhill and unincorporated parts of the county.
“We’re treating the judicial branch as if it were an agency, when it’s really a separate branch of government.”
In this austere future the legal community worries that felons could be released because of speedy trial violations, without time to determine status, a habitual felon could make bail, and misdemeanors could be summarily dismissed.
“If we’re looking at another 10 percent cut, it’s probably going to become more visible to the public that the court system is hurting,” said Barbara Dawicke, court administrator for the 15th Judicial Circuit in Palm Beach County. A problem that courts have, Dawicke noted, is that not only do cuts in the justice system affect the public’s services, but they almost always translate directly into lost jobs. “Our budget is primarily salaries. It’s not like we can take some trucks off the road,” she said.
The last round of holdbacks earlier this fiscal year cost her circuit 16 employees out of a total staff of 189.
And cases keep streaming in. Pending caseloads almost doubled in a year in the Palm Beach County Circuit Court, from about 26,000 in November 2007 to almost 50,000 by November 2008.
“We are beginning to see our pending caseloads rise, which is impending evidence that there’s a growing backlog, particularly in the trial courts where there have been cuts of staff resources,” said state courts administrator Lisa Goodner, who was also present with Quince during her December presentation. “We’ve got a particularly acute problem with foreclosures.”
In a state with no income tax that depends on property taxes as a major stream of revenue, foreclosures burn the budgetary wax at both ends. Foreclosure filings in Florida shot up from around 8,000 in December 2006 to exceed 35,000 in September 2008.
“Our caseload, unlike a business, does not go down as the economy suffers. In fact, our caseload increases as the economy suffers,” said Chief Judge Robert M. Gross of the 4th District Court of Appeal. “The court system does not operate like a business and can’t cut back on its ability to resolve those cases.”
Like many of the state’s attorneys concerned with budgetary problems, Gross pointed out that the courts system’s budget is small piece of the fiscal pie — 0.7 percent — compared with other government-funded concerns.
Appellate courts generally run lean — Goodner said none of the state’s appellate courts have added a judicial position since 1999 and Gross said that his court has trimmed its financial waistline by not filling open positions. His court now waits two months even to fill judicial slots, he said.
Now that the legislature could be looking at cutting the courts budget by as much as another 10 percent, Gross contended that cuts to appellate courts would come closer to the bone of the court system’s mission.
“When we take a cut, it’s usually someone involved in the core function of deciding cases,” he said. The 4th DCA currently has about 80 positions. “There would be delays in resolving appeals.” His Miami-Dade counterpart, Chief Judge David Gersten, echoed Gross’ dire tone.
“It’s going to have a dramatic impact on the flow of cases, if they cut our budget it will be devastating,” he said. During the three holdbacks that started in September 2007 and totalled $44.5 million, Gersten said his court laid off five employees. “I’m hoping the bottom is now,” he said ruefully. “But maybe I’m just an optimist.”
Although 87 percent of the court system’s budget goes to salaries, some believe there is still room to streamline the structure and organization of the courts to save money. Advocates of a paperless courthouse, like Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts Harvey Ruvin, believe that a possible way to save money when purse strings are tight is to digitize much of the courts’ paperwork.
“The efficiencies you build into the system are enormous. The non-value added labor involved in moving paper is one of the largest drags on resources in any court system,” he said.
While Florida’s courts are largely still offline due to privacy concerns, Ruvin has managed to take the traffic court paperless, a move he contends saves $10 million annually. But a persistent obstacle Ruvin cites is the initial money needed to sink into digitizing a division, money that likely won’t materialize in a recession year.
And as crime rises and resources dwindle, prosecutors who handle all the state’s criminal cases look warily at the Legislature’s ax.
“We’re extremely concerned but hopeful that they will not put citizens’ safety in the mix with across-the-board cuts,” said Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. She said that less than 0.05 of the state budget — about $358 million — goes to its 20 state attorney’s offices. After the most recent 10 percent holdback in an effort to save $5 million, the Miami-Dade office lost about 90 of its 700 staff members, less than half of whom are attorneys. The office is currently one of the largest in the nation and has an operating budget of $60 million.
The latest special session has thrown Rundle’s office into deep introspection as managers consider which of its appendages might get the chop.
“We’re so small that it doesn’t make any sense to amputate us,” she said. “Law and order and citizen safety are the core pieces of every free society.”
The range of unpalatable potential solutions she mentioned included the possibility of closing special units to not prosecuting misdemeanors.
“Which cases do the public not want me to prosecute? Which one of all these laws that the legislature has enacted does it not want us to pursue?” she said.
Those sentiments were echoed by Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, who bemoaned a sheaf of newly criminalized offenses that cost time and money to prosecute and defend, “including whether your pants are being worn too low on your hips,” he said. Lawmakers “pass all these laws but at the same time they’re not willing to fund the system. It is an equation for disaster.”
Miami-Dade County’s public defender-elect Carlos Martinez also recommended reclassifying misdemeanors as a possible solution in tight times.
In September, the Miami-Dade public defender’s office made headlines when Circuit Judge Stanford Blake ruled it could decline its third-degree felony cases. The 181-attorney office argued in court papers that it was lean to the point of not being able to adequately represent its clients, about 60 percent of the county’s criminal defendants, and Blake at least partially agreed. The case is currently on appeal and is slated to be heard by the 3rd DCA in March. The office also had to cut 8.5 percent of its $29 million trial budget this past year, a situation which Blake considered in his ruling. Now the grim prospect of further cuts could strap it even more, and other public defender’s offices across the state have warned they may follow suit if their budgets continue to shrink.
Not everyone looks at the special session as the final cut. For Gelber, today’s meeting is the easy part. The hard part, he noted dryly, will come in March, when he and his colleagues will be whittling down the current $66 billion budget to a trimmer figure potentially worth billions less for the upcoming fiscal year. “This is not the big game, this is almost the preseason,” he said. “The big game is going to be in March, when we take all the cuts, all the future cuts, and craft the [next year’s] budget from that.
“These are terrible times.”
Billy Shields can be reached at billy.shields@incisivemedia.com or at (305) 347-6649. |
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