You remember those two twin censors (tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum) in the movie Good Morning Vietnam? As we’ve been trying to tell you, they now work for Phil Carrizosa and Peter Allen.
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June 1, 2012
Dear Members and Others,
We attach two pieces for you that you will not read in the AOC E-News. The first is from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Andrew S. Ross. The second, an editorial response from retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Horan, recently ran in the Courthouse News.
Over the past few years, members of the Alliance have engaged in continual — usually fruitless — efforts to get the AOC E-News staff to include articles and columns in their daily news service to judges that present a different viewpoint from those expressed by Judicial Council members and their acolytes. The AOC now has a blanket prohibition, confirmed to us in writing, on running any stories or editorials from the Courthouse News Service, a nationwide online and print organization with staff and reporters across the country who cover 2000 courts. In our view this is a direct result of the fact that the Courthouse News has not shied away from reporting the truth about the AOC and about their failed CCMS computer system.
We believe it is important that judges be accorded the right to read differing opinions, rather than being spoon-fed articles that AOC staffer Phillip Carrizosa deems appropriate for you to see. Apparently the AOC is of the mind that “speaking with one voice” trumps transparency. Thus we will continue to provide you with articles and columns that you would not otherwise receive.
Directors, Alliance of California Judges
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S.F. Chronicle
Administrative Office of the Courts needs trims
Andrew S. Ross, Chronicle Columnist
Thursday, May 31, 2012
As Gov. Jerry Brown has made clear, California’s courts, including San Francisco’s, are facing more closings and layoffs in an attempt to close the state’s budget chasm.
But an official report, released ever-so-quietly over the Memorial Day weekend, suggests there are other places the governor should be looking.
The 298-page report, compiled by a panel of judges appointed by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, takes a hard look at the system’s governing bureaucracy, the Administrative Office of the Courts, and finds it wanting in numerous ways.
For example: “Many of the AOC’s management functions – including the manner in which it carries out its decisions, plans projects, and exercises fiscal options – are flawed (and) lack transparency … with significant negative fiscal impacts as a result.”
Even as trial courts began laying off staff last year, the administrative office, which controls the courts’ purse strings as part of the state’s policy-making Judicial Council, continued to balloon in size, from 430 employees in 2002 to 1,100 in 2011, while its internal management “largely went unmonitored,” according to the report.
Among the unmonitored items:
— A slew of six-figure salaries enjoyed by its “overstaffed” management.
— “Seemingly unlimited funding” for what turned out to be a $1.9 billion white elephant – a computerized statewide case management system.
— $11 million annual rent for its San Francisco headquarters at 455 Golden Gate Ave. (when Sacramento, the state capital, would be so much cheaper).
— A “scholar in residence” who gets paid $6,000 a month, works part time and lives in Virginia.
— A full-time staff attorney listed as working in the San Francisco office who “telecommutes” from Switzerland.
The 11-member Strategic Evaluation Committee spent over a year putting the report together, concluding that “the AOC has not been credible or transparent concerning such important matters as budgeting, staffing levels, hiring freezes and furloughs, large-scale projects, and other areas of importance.”
Who’s in charge? The report makes 120 recommendations, including slashing the office’s payroll, eliminating many of its functions and moving its headquarters out of high-priced San Francisco.
While that would do little to mitigate the judiciary’s pain – compare the office’s 2010-11 budget of $163 million, as itemized on Brown’s “May revise,” with the $544 million in cuts he wants from the courts this year – at least some of the pain would be more equitably shared.
Commenting on the report, Cantil-Sakauye said cuts to the administrative office’s budget have already begun, including a planned staff reduction of approximately 250 by the end of the month.
However, she added, “I want to make sure that work of the committee is front and center on the Judicial Council’s agenda in the coming year.”
Whether the Judicial Council, the policy-making body that is supposed to oversee the office, is up to the job is another matter.
“The AOC is supposed to function as the staff to the Judicial Council, but the roles seem to have been reversed. It’s as if the bureaucracy has taken over the board of directors,” said San Francisco Superior Court Presiding Judge Katherine Feinstein, echoing a criticism other California judges have made.
As to the report on the office itself, Feinstein said, “I have way more to say than The San Francisco Chronicle could possibly print.
“Aside from all the flaws and horrors the report points out, it’s prima facie evidence that the trial court’s financial future shouldn’t rest solely at the discretion of the Administrative Office of the Courts.”
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When the AOC Is Gone
By CHARLES HORAN
Recently Tehama County Superior Court’s Presiding Judge Richard Scheuler authored an editorial in the Daily Journal titled, “Small Courts Rely on AOC Services.”
The editorial was a rebuttal to comments by Judge Robert Dukes of the Los Angeles Superior Court that appeared days earlier in the Courthouse News service, which Judge Scheuler mischaracterized as a “blog,” though it is a fully-staffed national news service that has been doing business since the 1990s.
Scheuler took issue with Dukes’s assessment of the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) as a bloated and not terribly useful or productive bureaucracy.
Judge Scheuler oversees a court consisting of four judges and a commissioner, and roughly 45 full time employees. His editorial argued that small courts like Tehama simply could not function without the help of the AOC.
He made similar points to the Courthouse News Service on 1/27/12, when he voiced his concern that “the forces that oppose the Judicial Council and the Administrative Office of the Courts oppose centralization, without which small courts could not survive.”
I do not come from Tehama, but I note that Judge Scheuler’s court has existed since 1860, or thereabouts, and for roughly the first 120 years of that period there was no AOC and there was absolutely no centralized governance of the 58 county trial courts.
Yet somehow Tehama’s court survived.
Now, however, Judge Scheuler believes that his court must depend on the AOC for almost everything — judicial training, contract drafting, legal advice, financial oversight, lawsuit defense, financial services, labor negotiation, legal compliance “support” (AOC audits), technology support, assistance in dealing with “justice partners,” backfilling for judges away at AOC mandated training, and “much, much more.”
Not to mention the new $72 million courthouse he candidly hopes the AOC will provide — at roughly twice the per-square-foot cost of courthouses built in New York City.
Why are five bench officers and 45 employees incapable of handling the court’s business in a county of 60,000 residents? Why must services be centralized in order to be affordable and available?
Scheuler doesn’t even attempt to answer these questions, apparently simply assuming that centralization is always a positive attribute of governance. That some AOC services are necessary is undoubtedly the case.
However, small courts have traditionally handled all of the functions above, and more.
Why is the 150 year old Tehama Superior Court now content to have its affairs largely managed by a central bureaucracy? Why can’t Tehama hire people to perform tasks now done by the AOC or contract out for those services?
The answer is quite clear: The AOC has bled the courts, including Tehama, bone dry.
While our budgets are being relentlessly cut due to a horrible economy, the agency Judge Schueler describes as “stupendous” took hundreds of millions from the Trial Court Trust Fund for a computer system that the judges of this state didn’t want, didn’t need and couldn’t afford.
(Hypocritically, at the same time the AOC was tossing a half billion dollars down the drain, and lobbying against a CCMS audit, it performed an audit of the Tehama court, which was published on-line in May 2011.
The AOC auditors chastised the court for, among other things, violating an AOC policy by buying sandwiches and soft drinks for non-sequestered jurors. Tehama promised to do better.)
At the same it was spending trial court operating funds at a breathtaking rate, the AOC shoved its way into every aspect of statewide court operations it could, both to increase its power and its staff — 20 years ago, the AOC had 200 employees, and in recent times has had over 1000, though it has been chronically dishonest about the true number of employees.
That Scheuler now feels incapable of handling his court’s affairs for the benefit of his constituents without constant intervention and oversight by the AOC is exactly the problem — centralization has led to dependence, which has morphed into subservience, taking power from those elected to wield it and responsibility from those chosen to shoulder it.
Instead, both power and responsibility have devolved to unelected and wholly unaccountable bureaucrats.
“Stupendous” is not a word I would use to describe the situation where bureaucrats are empowered and elected constitutional officers perceive themselves as dependent upon them for survival. I call it intolerable.
Former Chief Justice Ron George, the chief architect of our current governance structure, believed that “economies of scale” would enable a central bureaucracy to save money on everything from CCMS to court construction to routine courthouse maintenance, and that the current model would guarantee an “adequate and stable” source of funding.
Experience has shown the opposite — chewing gum removal and light bulb replacement costs thousands of dollars, $200 million computer systems cost $1.9 billion and have to be abandoned midway through, and courthouses are overpriced even in the planning stage.
California Department of Finance Director Ana Matosantos noted in May that, “A fundamental reorganization of the court structure carried out under former Chief Justice Ron George had exacerbated the financial difficulty for the courts.” (Courthouse News Service, May 14, 2012).
More and more judges refuse to see themselves as helpless and are awakening to the fact that the price of centralization has been the subjugation of our courts by bureaucrats and handpicked members of the Judicial Council, a financial crisis in the judiciary, and deep schisms among judges.
A mix of large, medium, and small courts support the passage of AB 1208, a bill sponsored by the over 400 members of the Alliance of California Judges that would mandate that funds delivered to the trial courts not be captured by the AOC.
Los Angeles, with over 450 judges, Sacramento with 53, Kern with 35, San Mateo with 23 all have endorsed the bill. Mariposa and Amador, each with two judges, were early supporters of AB 1208, not sharing Judge Scheuler’s notion that only a central bureaucracy will allow small courts to thrive.
AB 1208 would, at a minimum, allow courts to keep that which is allocated to them by the legislature, without AOC holdbacks.
Courts would still be free to contract for services with the AOC if they wished — then the AOC could compete for trial court dollars just like any other vendor.
For that matter, there is absolutely nothing to prevent courts from forming consortiums and other cooperative agreements for training, legal assistance, and purchasing of services, whether from the AOC, from vendors, or from one another.
The judges of this state are remarkable people. Most are talented, hard-working, and inventive. It’s time they get busy and retake responsibility for the future of their courts, which existed before the AOC, and will exist long after the AOC is gone.
Charles Horan is a retired Judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, and was a founding Director of the Alliance of California Judges
Related articles
- California court bureaucracy battered in new report (mercurynews.com)
- Administrative Office of the Courts needs trims (sfgate.com)
- Legislative action now needed – Contact your legislators (judicialcouncilwatcher.wordpress.com)
Wendy Darling
June 2, 2012
“The AOC now has a blanket prohibition, confirmed to us in writing, on running any stories or editorials from the Courthouse News Service, a nationwide online and print organization with staff and reporters across the country who cover 2000 courts.” . . . “Apparently the AOC is of the mind that “speaking with one voice” trumps transparency.”
Really? But according to the Chief Justice, so much has “changed” at the AOC in last 55 weeks. Which, as we all know, means nothing has really changed at all. Including SWOV, which doesn’t just trump transparency at 455 Golden Gate Avenue, but trumps everything — ethics, accountablity, telling the truth, obeying the law, the First Amendment. You name it, SWOV trumps it. So much for “transparency” in any shape or form at the AOC.
And as for intentionally omitting articles for judges consideration from the AOC’s e-news, who anointed Phillip Carrizosa the Chancellor of Sensorship with the power or right to decide what is, or is not, “appropriate” for the judges of this State to read? Is it the Chief Justice that permits Carrizosa to engage in this sensorship? It would seem that judges are more than capable of deciding for themselves what to read, and for handling the truth. After all, they are charged with that public duty in their courtrooms every day.
It isn’t called the Administrative Office of Corruption without good reason.
They just don’t get it.
Recall the Chief Justice.
Long live the ACJ.
Michael Paul
June 2, 2012
Fox News is fair and transparent compared to enews. By the way, since I worked with the nice researchers in the library that spend all day pouring through news and internet articles to submit to management, rest assured that you’re only getting a small fraction of the articles they discover and only after they’re vetted by management.
Dan Dydzak
June 2, 2012
Despite the resistance of the Attorney General of California, I am noticing and scheduling depositions. The transcripts will be made available to Judicial Watcher, including any depostions of CJ, Messrs. Vickrey and Overholt. There is a need for openness and freedom of expression. The judiciary is required to safeguard those interests. Star Chamber proceedings were supposed to end after enactment of the Magna Carta. Or do we need to call in Robin Hood from Sherwood Forest with Friar Tuck and Lady Marianne? Michael Paul and JW, keep up the good work. It is certainly now being noticed by the mainstream media. Hopefully, the candid, fair and objective analyses of the Alliance Judges are being noticed, and their ideas will be implemented to ensure a fair and impartial judiciary in California. Due process should not only be observed in the courtroom but in administrative matters where safeguarding public policy matters. I have alerted the Attorney General of California that she is required to uphold the Rule of Law with regard to the judiciary and basic precepts of fairness and equity. The judiciary needs to safeguard as well the sanctity of the purse and California treasury. After all, taxpayers pay the judges and the costs of judicial administration. There should be no pilfering; the Roman Empire fell when abuses came about, as did the Third Reich, as did Napoleon–history is replete with those lessons. We all know what Lord Acton famously said about absolute power.
courtflea
June 2, 2012
I believe unfortunately wheather we like it or not, this is the way government has become in the good ole USA. Power hungry get rich type folks are the ones that are seeking office, forget doing it for a higher cause. This has always made me want to puke. But if you sit back at really look at it, if you really care and try to make a difference in the public sector elected or not, you are going to be eaten up and spit out in no time. BUT compared to the middle east, south america, yemen, mexico lately, etc. I will take our screwed up system anytime. That being said these idiots can still kiss my arse.
I will say after just disovering it in the news media this week, I think all of these jerks are on bath salts. Hey, if you take it you can eat off another persons face, all in good fun!
Lando
June 4, 2012
The control imposed by this regime starts early. It begins with New Judges Orientation and New Judges College. The JC/AOC took over both programs and created the idea that the branch only spoke with “one voice”, the CJ’s. The JC/AOC also paid for the building of its own television studio at the crystal palace along with the creation of a Public Affairs Unit , which creates one sided videos lauding the JC/AOC accomplishments. The best of the videos regarding the success of CCMS “we are at the tipping point” are now hard to find but represent the “Soviet ” like approach to control of information the JC/AOC must have. If memory serves correctly over 3 employees work full time to implement the CJ’s vision of media control including the censorship described above. Like the “Scholars in Residence” , “Judges in Residence”, ” telecommuting lawyers ” from as far a way as Europe , “regional managers” and a “prison receiver” the public relations unit of the JC/AOC only serves to enhance the JC/AOC’s power at the expense of the trial courts. It needs to go along with all of the above .
The OBT
June 4, 2012
Telecommuting lawyers from the Midwest and Europe . How exactly does that work ? Can someone please explain the justification for that ? While we are on this subject can someone explain why the AOC pays the salary and I assume retirement benefits for Clark Kelso, the Prison Receiver who manages the Department of Corrections Health Care?
Wendy Darling
June 4, 2012
There’s a whole bunch of us that have been asking these same questions, OBT, and we also would like the answers. Perhaps someone up at the State Legislature, say, perhaps, the Assembly Commitee on Accountability and Administrative Review, could ask those questions of the AOC and require some answers, perferably under oath.
Long live the ACJ.
Philip R. Carrizosa
June 5, 2012
Regarding the article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the simple truth is that I was unaware of the article until Monday when a colleague brought it to my attention. Neither Google Alerts nor Google searches picked up this article.
If I had seen it, I would have certainly selected it for use in E-News and circulated it among my colleagues for their opinion. E-News is reviewed by a half-dozen people before it is distributed. The decision about what to include in E-News is NOT mine alone.
In the future, I would appreciate an opportunity to be heard before aspersions are cast about me.
Wendy Darling
June 5, 2012
Hey, Phillip, it’s good to know that you’re reading JCW at the AOC. Doing that on State-paid time? And when AOC employees are afforded an opportunity to be heard before aspersions are cast about them, the AOC can then make that request on behalf of themselves. And please don’t try and claim that there isn’t censorship going on at 455 Golden Gate Avenue. That lie won’t be believed here. We all know better.
BTW, the AOC was closed last Monday.
Long live the ACJ.
Philip R. Carrizosa
June 6, 2012
Wendy, I checked JCW during my personal break time. Please do not call me a liar without evidence. BTW, the AOC was open on Monday, June 4. Perhaps you are mistaking it for Monday, May 28, a state holiday, which was five days BEFORE the Chronicle article.
Wendy Darling
June 6, 2012
The AOC engages in censorship. This is not a lie. It’s a part of that Speak With One Voice and “culture of control” thing. Also, Phillip, some of us haven’t forgotten the email regarding “selling an approach” to Kenneth Ofgang at the Metropolitan News Enterprise.
Enough said.
Long live the ACJ.
Judicial Council Watcher
June 5, 2012
Hi Mr. Carrizosa,
Welcome to JCW. Circulating articles critical of the AOC amongst tweedles dee and dum isn’t going to get them out to the trial courts.
You cannot conduct censorship and claim to be transparent. It was AOC censorship that fueled this sites creation. As the spokesperson for the AOC you should drive the bus on what’s released. It is policy decisions like this that have our readership growing by leaps and bounds because people are looking for a more credible explanation than those put forth by the AOC. In the future, we’ll bounce things off of you before we ‘cast aspersions’ – aspersions are better than rotten fruit.
Wendy Darling
June 5, 2012
“Circulating articles critical of the AOC amongst tweedles dee and dum isn’t going to get them out to the trial courts.”
Those that visit JCW know when the AOC is “painting the roses red,”
Long live the ACJ.
unionman575
June 7, 2012
https://judicialcouncilwatcher.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/aoc-telecommuting-when-a-few-equals-98-an-editorial-by-judge-dan-goldstein/#comment-9520
unionman575
June 7, 2012
This one goes out to you Philip C. and everyone else over there at the Ministry of Truth:
JusticeCalifornia
June 5, 2012
I welcome CJ/JC/AOC participation on JCW.
These discussions are long overdue.
Lando
June 7, 2012
Mr Carrizosa , I think it is healthy you are reading this blog. By doing so you will see that many thoughtful and intelligent people have significant concerns about the operation of the JC and AOC. In fact the SEC report validates much of what many of us here have been saying for years. Your voice and views like all others should be welcome here .Thats what is great about our country, we all respect and believe in the right to free speech. While I personally disagree with AOC policy about censoring the Courthousenews.com , I am guessing the decision to do that was made at the highest levels of the JC/AOC . Thanks again Mr Carrizosa for offering your views here. As Justice above said, these discussions are long overdue.
unionman575
June 7, 2012
I get enough of the AOC/SWOV view on the official JC site. If I want to read Pravda I’ll get my info there.
Get me a bucket!