July 16, 2012
Dear Members and Others:
First, let us offer our thanks and congratulations to those of you have already responded to the invitation of the Chief Justice to comment on the report of her SEC committee by emailing invitations@jud.ca.gov. We are heartened and proud that so many California judges have stepped up to insist that the recommendations of the SEC be immediately adopted by the Council and implemented promptly. Only this sort of outpouring of comment will translate this view, which we believe is the correct one, into reality.
To see the comments received and posted thus far, please simply click on
http://www.courts.ca.gov/18441.htm and you will be taken to the Council website where each comment is listed in reverse order of receipt. The website is updated roughly at 4:30 p.m. every day, so if you don’t see your comment, wait a day and it will probably be up. If it isn’t, contact us and we’ll make sure it is.
Please understand that this battle is far from over. Those who favor the status quo
are also making their views known and more will do so during the comment period, which ends on July 22. Please see, for example, the comment of Mr. Alexander Aikman, a well known administrative guru and former vice president of the National Center for State Courts. (The AOC still pays the National Center roughly $1 million per year for its “services.”)
Mr. Aikman finds nothing but fault with the SEC report, and he argues that no changes should be implemented at all by the Council. He characterizes the SEC investigation as incomplete because not every single court employee in the state was contacted (a process that would have turned a 55-week process into one taking years), ignoring the fact that the committee sent out over 3,500 surveys to all current and recently retired judges and justices, all 58 current court executive officers, all AOC directors and unit managers, all other AOC employees and everyone who has worked at the AOC in the past five years, as well as to those outside the judiciary who have an interest in its operations.
He argues that new AOC leadership (as yet unnamed) must determine which, if any, SEC recommendations should be adopted. His views seem shaped by a mistrust of–if not an outright disdain for–judges, and his belief in the primacy of administrators mirrors the current culture of control permeating the AOC. Mr. Aikman seems to suggest that the judicial role is valuable largely because the respect inherent in the office provides a credible public face for the actions of administrators-the true visionaries. Consistent with that view, he expressly urges the Council to simply ignore the views expressed by judges seeking swift implementation of the SEC’s recommendations.
A few of his views bear repeating.
“No attempt should be made to try to eliminate either mistakes or discretion (of the AOC) or set the Council up as a supernumerary administration.”
“Observers have noted for many years that judges’ perspectives are ‘professional,’ i.e., focused on their status as professionals and their ‘independence” rather than on the court as an institution with requirements and needs independent of individual judges preferences.”
“New leadership…should be given a chance to propose and implement specific changes.”
“It will not be easy to disregard the many voices calling for immediate and dramatic action, but it is best for the Council and branch if it does so.”
“Relying primarily on judges weakens the result because many judges do not have the background in management policy and experience that will produce the best solution.”
His public comment mirrors many of his earlier published comments. The following is from his article, “The Need for Leaders in Court Administration,” which appeared in The Court Manager, Volume 22, Issue 1.
“Judges should set the parameters of the position and then get out of the way.”
“It is very hard for administrators to be leaders in courts. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is very hard for administrators to be the visible leaders of significant change…”
“If judges will allow administrators to do the management job they were hired to do, and if judges can learn to be comfortable having a strong manager make decisions without their input or control…the judicial branch will continue to grow and prosper.” (Emphasis ours.)
“Judges need to know what management is, how to be an employee (emphasis ours), without jeopardizing one’s electability or adjudicatory independence, and how to oversee the work of their administrator without imposing their individual judgment about how things should be done or specific outcomes that must be achieved.”
Mr. Aikman sees no fault with the AOC. Rather, judges are the problem. In the same article cited above, Mr. Aikman wrote: “Judges are not writing about why their administrators should be regarded as peers with different skill sets rather than assistants who deal with organization details with which they do not want to deal. Judges are not writing about the need for effective administrators. Therefore, the second part of the need is judicial education.” (Emphasis in original.)
It is views like these that created the AOC that we have today. Judges in this state must continue to speak out and not accede to those, like Mr. Aikman, who insist that judges’ voices be “ignored.”
Thank you for your continued support, and if you haven’t yet sent your public comment in, please do so immediately.
Directors,
Alliance of California Judges
*corrected to reflect Mr. Aikman was an NCSC vice president.
Judicial Council Watcher 
Wendy Darling
July 16, 2012
Published today, Monday, July 16, from the Metropolitan News Enterprise, by Kenneth Ofgang:
Frustrated Judge Lance Ito Calls AOC ‘Deceptive, Vindictive, Manipulated’
Jurist Bemoans Losing His Courtroom, but Says He Has No Plans to Quit
By KENNETH OFGANG, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito, expressing frustration over the closing of his courtroom, said Friday the judicial branch has itself to blame for its financial predicament.
In an interview elaborating on comments he submitted to the Judicial Council, he said he was not excusing the Legislature, which he said treats the judiciary as “another special interest” rather than “an independent and essential branch of government.”
But the recent acknowledgment that the judiciary’s plan for a central computer system had essentially flopped, at a cost of $2 billion—“that’s $1 million per courtroom,” Ito remarked—along with lesser failures, “have shown we’re incompetent to govern ourselves” and “done long term damage to the branch itself,” he said.
In his comments to the council, reproduced on Page 3, Ito became one of several judges who have urged rapid implementation of the recommendations of the chief justice’s Strategic Evaluation Committee. He accused the AOC of having adopted a “circle the wagons mentality,” when what it should to is to acknowledge that it “has been run in a deceptive, vindictive and manipulative manner” and get about the business of reform.
“The bottom line is that NOTHING will change,” he wrote, “until…the selection process for Judicial Council membership is changed from dictatorial to democratic” or the council “actually takes its role seriously rather than being rubber stamping sycophants.”
Ito said he was writing those words after spending an afternoon “boxing up my personal belongings from my bench as the jury from what may be very last trial of my judicial career ponders the fate of a man charged with a double murder for financial gain.”
He told the MetNews Friday that he has no immediate plans to retire, although he just completed 23 years of judicial service and will be 62 years old next month. He said he will not know what his next assignment will be until he meets with the presiding judge in the next week or so.
In the meantime he is addressing “about a week’s worth of paperwork,” Friday was devoted to working on warrants, he said.
His frustration with his personal situation is clear—“I am mildly annoyed to be one of the persons chosen to be rusticated,” he put it—but he says far more than the personal wellbeing of judges is at stake.
“One hundred twenty miles south you’ll find a judiciary that doesn’t function very well,” he said, “and you see what happens as a result.”
He noted that in some counties, elected officials are stepping up to help the courts. Ventura County, for example, is using county funds to keep the Simi Valley courthouse open.
The Los Angeles County trial courts, he said, had that type of relationship with the county when the trial courts were county-funded. Now the courts are dependent on state funding, which is drying up, and if the governor’s tax initiative fails in November, “we are going to have a real disaster.”
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Ito Comments on SEC Report
To the Chief Justice and Members of the Judicial Council:
The reaction by the Judicial Council to the SEC report, to send the issues evaluated out for yet more study rather than taking immediate action, bodes III for the expectation any positive action will follow. Shortly after spending the better part of two days studying the thoughtful, thorough and comprehensive report, I spoke with a close friend and AOC acolyte. I expected her to finally concede the AOC has been run in a deceptive, vindictive and manipulative manner, and that the Judicial Council had abdicated its fiduciary duties to the trial courts and the citizenry for the past decade. Instead I got what I later learned was the list of AOC responsive talking points that the SEC report was a, “..snapshot in time,” a time long past and that many of the called for reforms were already underway. It is apparent the AOC has adopted a circle the wagons mentality rather than using the report as a starting point for a new era of actual rather than faux transparency. Again, I ask: Who in the AOC drafted and who approved the submission of the trailer bill that would ship the local courts of their ability to select a presiding judge?
The bottom line is that NOTHING will change until one of two things happen: 1) The selection process for Judicial Council membership is changed from dictatorial to democratic with the trial and appellate courts able to vote; or 2) The new Judicial Council actually takes its role seriously rather than being rubber stamping sycophants. The fact 99% of the votes of the Judicial Council have been unanimous for the past decade speaks for itself. Likewise the fact Judge David Wesley’s motion to accept the SEC report and to move forward immediately died for lack of a second. For the past five years trial court judges and administrators have been pointing out the intuitively obvious disaster presented by CCMS, but the Judicial Council failed to exercise even a minimum of oversight. One would think some questions might be raised when the original cost estimate increases by a factor of ten. Even after the state auditor’s report ripped the program and pointed out the AOC’s gross incompetence and mismanagement, the Judicial Council continued to support it. I am reminded of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Voices of dissent were not tolerated in the past and punishment in the form of favoritism and funding decisions were commonly used and widely feared. Those judges posting comments in support of immediate implementation of the SEC report’s recommendations will likely never be appointed to any Judicial Council position or committee and can expect their application to sit on assignment to be denied. CJER will drop them as instructors. The AOC and Judicial Council’s anti-Los Angeles bias is palpable. The Chief Justice told editors of the Los Angeles Times that the LA. County Superior Court’s position is ‘very much misguided” and called then LA Presiding Judge McCoy’s forecasts of impending closures and layoffs a “Chicken Little approach.” “I think it’s very interesting that no other court has claimed that there will be such calamitous results 2/16/2010 LA Times. Today courts across the state are closing courtrooms, in large part due to the fiscal mismanagement by the AOC and the lack of diligence by the Judicial Council. The Full Court Press we saw over the past month in Sacramento with the AOC lobbyists boiling the halls of the legislature and the office of the Governor’s Budget Director were all efforts too little and at least four years too late. And now it appears those efforts were as much directed at avoiding AB 1208 type language as they were towards saving the judicial branch. The slow motion train wreck that California’s budget has become was apparent to the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court in late 2008 when the first round of new austerity measures were discussed and voted upon.
Mine is one of 56 courtrooms closed in Los Angeles County as of July 1st and I spent my afternoon today boxing up my personal belongings from my bench as the jury from what may be the very last trial of my judicial career ponders the fate of a man charged with a double murder for financial gain. What is maddening is that this did not have to be. Sadly, the AOC and the Judicial Council, in their prepared talking points in response to the SEC report, ask us still and again to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
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Long live Judge Ito. And long live the ACJ.
Judicial Council Watcher
July 16, 2012
SF Superior Court SEIU 1021 Employees – Have we told you that YOU ROCK?
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Surprise-strike-closes-SF-courtrooms-3710606.php
Take no crap (or wooden nickels) from SofaMan or the AOC.
unionman575
July 16, 2012
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2012/07/san_francisco_court_strike.php
Local News
San Francisco Court Workers Go on Strike, Disrupt Courts
By Erin SherbertMon., Jul. 16 2012 at 9:19 AM
The government is melting down
Muni isn’t the only government agency melting down today. A press release was just sent out, claiming more than 200 court clerks and other workers walked off the job at 8:30 a.m., effectively shutting down disrupting the entire Superior Court system.
The workers, represented by SEIU Local 1021, say they are striking to demand their legal right to information that would “allow them to negotiate a fair contract that keeps courtrooms open and legal services available to the public, while providing them with reasonable compensation.”
Not surprisingly, we’ve been unable to reach anyone over at the courthouse to talk.
But here’s what union workers had to say:
For the past eight years, the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), the bureaucracy that manages California’s courts, has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a boondoggle computer program, the hiring of hundreds of redundant six-figure-salaried bureaucrats, administrators and lawyers and overpriced mega-construction projects. In the meantime hundreds of courtrooms across the state have been closed, legal services for the public have been slashed, and we, the workers who provide those services, have been laid off, furloughed and had our wages cut.
Union officials will hold a press conference later this morning to explain more.
Court workers has been threatening a strike since May when 95 percent of the union voted in favor of striking in the event that negotiations hit a dead end. Workers have been complaining that the AOC has hidden millions in secret accounts for its “pet projects and personal perks,” and then lied about it.
Now, as the union works to try and get a new contract, AOC officials are forcing more paycuts along with heavier work loads, union reps claim.
“When the Local 1021 asked San Francisco Superior Court management to open the books and show the financial need for the continuing cuts, they refused,” the press release states. “When, as part of the bargaining process, the union requested they provide the financial information that federal law requires of them so the union can make reasonable and responsible counterproposals, in the court’s tradition of lack of transparency, they didn’t. Instead they abandoned negotiations and unilaterally imposed their cuts.”
SEIU says the San Francisco Superior Court’s actions are a violation of federal labor law.
“We are sorry for the inconvenience our action today causes. But there comes a time when someone must take a stand against this assault on citizens’ constitutional right of the access to justice, and for reasonable compensation for the court’s skilled and dedicated employees. Someone must say, ‘Enough is enough!'”
Hopefully, court workers weren’t relying on Muni to make their dramatic exit.
Wendy Darling
July 16, 2012
Published today, Monday, July 16, from Courthouse News Service, by Dave Tartre:
SF Superior Court Workers Strike
By DAVE TARTRE
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – Court workers walked off their jobs Monday, effectively shutting down both the civil and criminal divisions of San Francisco’s Superior Court.
Members of Service Employees International Union, Local 1021 decided to flex their collective muscle in an effort to force the court to provide the union with budget information that could justify a recently imposed wage cut.
“We have a really strong walkout here,” said union spokesperson Steve Stallone, adding that most of the local’s 225 members are participating. Stallone also said the disruption at the court wouldn’t last long, “It’s a one-day thing. We’ll be back at work tomorrow.”
Representatives from the court could not be reached for comment, but in a memo to workers last month, top court administrator Michael Yuen said he was being forced by reductions in trial court funding from the state to cut wages by five percent and to reduce some benefits. The mandatory changes became effective at the beginning of July.
“Over the last 3 years, we implemented ongoing operational cost-saving measures that resulted in approximately $12 million per year in savings, but those savings were not enough,” Yuen said in the memo.
Union members, though, say the wage cut cannot be imposed, but must instead be the result of informed negotiations.
Stallone said the union wants access to the court’s financial data and is entitled by labor law to see more information than the court has been willing to provide about its budget. Without the information, he said, the across-the-board wage cut is invalid.
“That is a violation of labor law to withhold financial data. It makes it impossible to negotiate around real numbers,” Stallone said, adding that the union had recently filed an unfair practice charge over the issue with the California Public Employment Relations Board. He said information about the San Francisco Superior’s reserves has become critical to negotiations in light of recent legislation that requires trial courts to spend down their reserves.
“They are forcing us to go on strike,” said Gary Feliciano, a union steward who works in the civil division. Speaking in front of the Civic Center Courthouse, Feliciano said, “We held off on our proposals until we could see the new data and numbers for a new contract. But they didn’t come through.”
“If they continue to impose terms, then we continue to strike,” Feliciano said, raising the possibility of a strike that lasts beyond today.
In late May the union authorized a strike with a yes vote by 95 percent of the members. Up to that point, union negotiators had met five times with court administrators, but the talks did not result in a deal to replace the labor agreement that expired in February.
In his June 4 memo, court administrator Yuen said that negotiations with Local 1021 had reached an impasse, while “the unions representing managers, court reporters, and various technical and professional classifications have agreed to and ratified the Court’s concession request.”
Yuen’s memo concluded that the cuts are necessary to “preserve access to justice to the greatest extent possible, while also saving Court employee jobs.”
http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/07/16/48426.htm
Long live the ACJ.
courtflea
July 16, 2012
As I have said here before Aikman is a scholar whom I respect a great deal, but not an in the trenches court administrator although he held that position briefly in El Dorado. His remarks should be taken as such. While he has a point about SOME judges (just like any other population some folks just don’t get it), court administrators know their jobs are to work with judges to do what is best for the organization, the public it serves, and to ensure that fair and impartial justice is delivered. Sure there maybe an administrative/managment curve for some judges as well as a judicial responisibility curve for administrators but hey, that is why the two work together so well, to make the organization work.
But another thing that is really bugging me: I am wondering about what exactly LA is doing to cut costs besides shutting courtrooms (which does not make a lot of sense to me since the judges still get paid so what are they doing now?). Have they closed the private judges cafeterias? Does each judge have his/her own law library in chambers at the cost of thousands of dollars per chamber? Does each judge still receive a copy of the Daily Journal or an on line subscription at the cost of $500 to $700 each per annum?We are talking about scores of judges working in the same courthouses right next door to each other. Do civil judges still have one law clerk per 2 judges (is that necessary now that civil courtrooms are being closed)? How many judicial secretaries are there now per judge? Are bailiffs, judicial assistants, and court reporters (working on transcript cash) still being paid to sit in dark courtrooms? Are judges that no longer have “courtrooms” picking up the work of laid off commissioners? Maybe my flea observations are way off base, but when I hear of courts laying off staff and commissioners, it just makes me wonder. And yes bloggers each of these questions are based in fact in current times or past. Since we are talking about court employees striking to know the truth about court budgets, I just wanted to know if stuff like this goes on in any court any longer (not just to pick on LA,, if other courts have or were doing the same things), while staff is being laid off. Like the guy who had a heart attack on the loading dock that was getting laid off before his demise.
Silicon Valley
July 17, 2012
No Flea, observations are spot on. I’ve lived through many bad budget cycles. This one is really different. No one is telling us “this is your last pen for this year.” “Don’t order any more Post Its.” “We are taking any suggestions for savings or efficiency.” What I do notice is that “so and so line worker quit or retired and we’re not going to replace him/her. You’re going to have to take on their work.” Meanwhile if there’s an Analyst, Manager or Director to fill…it’s done. There have been questionable realignments for people as well. Also, I notice new equipment being bought. In other words we are not doing the normal things done during a budget crisis. The only hiring freezes happening are with line workers and departments with weak directors.
I’m told we have reserves. Paid for I’m sure on the backs of the line workers. Everybody here seems very complacent. Anyone with eyes, ears and a brain knows that this can’t last forever. It’s a little top heavy here. We used to do more with a lot less managment. I had a longer post but I lost it. Just wanted to share my observation.
courtflea
July 16, 2012
PS I should add, I don’t believe that any employed CEO in California subscribes to the majority of Mr. Aikmans review of the SEC report and that do judges pay for the staffing and food at the private cafeterias? My recollection of one courthouse in downtown LA on Temple was there was no cafeteria for the staff or the public in the courthouse, just snack bars with no capability to serve cafeteria style food, but the judges had one in the same courthouse. But maybe I missed it on my visits to the courthouse. And yes I know I am going to get slammed for my observations. sorry I was just wondering and concerned that some monies could be better spent on staffing courtrooms.
courtflea
July 16, 2012
PSS I really do love LA I wish I knew how to post Randy Newmans video here JCW
Judicial Council Watcher
July 16, 2012
To post a video link from youtube, choose the video, choose the “share” button which will open a drop-down section, click the block that says “long link” and paste the link in your comment.
courtflea
July 16, 2012
Thank JCW!
courtflea
July 17, 2012
the silence is deafening.
Judicial Council Watcher
July 17, 2012
Our articles aren’t short. Right now there are about 200 pages per hour being read, though no one is commenting. 🙂