I don’t know what is more intellectually offensive – The AOC keeping 111 temps on their books or the October 16th, 4 hour meeting where everyone supervisor and above will be flown into San Francisco. Now if the purpose of this meeting was to issue pink slips, I could understand flying them in to fire them. But it isn’t. It is a 4 hour meet and greet with the new management team, which looks much like the old management team, save a few rearranged titanic deck chairs. What a stellar use of taxpayer funds!
And the band played on.
This week over a thousand court workers all over the state will be performing their last day of work for California’s judicial branch.
For the record, from the onset, we defined and demonstrated that this is a failure of AOC management and judicial branch governance. We went on the record to show and tell you all that was going on at the AOC in an effort to prevent those losses. Thanks to every reader we were all able to put a stop to CCMS by raising every red flag and asking others to take a critical look. We must now do the same for their construction program less we inherit tens of millions of dollars more in unfunded maintenance liability, forcing even more courthouses to close as they become unsafe.
Everything the AOC was and is doing is unsustainable without a multi-billion dollar cash infusion. And pray tell where does that money come from? That’s right, that money came from eliminating your job or closing your courtroom or courthouse and ultimately selling it off because branch courthouses cost more to operate.
Uh-huh.
But the AOC can (and does) have enough money to keep 111 temps and consultants employed full-time and continue to hire for these types of positions on a company confidential basis. In terms of real estate requirements to house 111 temps, you’re talking about an entire floor at the crystal palace or one of the Gateway Oaks floors they occupy.
They also have enough money to forego the use of their million dollar plus videoconferencing network that interlinks every AOC office and instead is setting up a mandatory supervisors and managers meeting on October 16th, in San Francisco. Fly, drive, carpool do whatever you can to bill the California taxpayer for your chance at meeting the titanic’s new band and new bandleader.
And the band played on.
Related articles
- Let’s talk fact check again…. (judicialcouncilwatcher.wordpress.com)
- When you can’t maintain the buildings you have, build more of them. (judicialcouncilwatcher.wordpress.com)
- AOC’s annual whistleblower policy notification – corrected. (judicialcouncilwatcher.wordpress.com)
- Join the AOC – Travel the world – and telecommute! (judicialcouncilwatcher.wordpress.com)
- AOC’s Internal use directory(Please don’t distribute this directory outside of the AOC) (LOL!)
unionman575
September 11, 2012
unionman575
September 11, 2012
More beautiful work JCW!
😉
Justice Barbra
September 11, 2012
If there is videoconferencing equipment, why are people required to attend in person? I have come to the conclusion that the Chief Justice really does not see her role as having any true connection to or awareness of the AOC, beyond superficial appearances at Judicial Council meetings. I am wondering if people who work at the AOC even understand what is happening, any more than people who work at the courts understand is happening. The segregation of management from non-management simply perpetuates a broken model that does not allow for oversight or employee satisfaction. In any work setting, if managers are overpaid and do not want to confront that reality, you cannot expect a willingness to change or any significant reform. People in the other branches may give Judge Jahr a small window to get up to speed, but he must be careful. If the other branches see the same behavior and the same faces, it will not engender support. Being out of touch will breed great discontent.
Wendy Darling
September 11, 2012
Oh, they “understand” what is happening, Justice Barbra. After all, the folks in charge at 455 Golden Gate Avenue orchestrated what is happening in the branch, and are completely proud of themselves for it. As to fallout from their misconduct? They couldn’t care less.
Instead of using videoconferencing equipment, let’s just fly everyone in to San Francisco at taxpayer expense. Court’s are cutting hours and/or closing all over the State, but at 455 Golden Gate Avenue there is money to waste, to get to wasting it. The latest installment of The Empress’ New Clothes.
unionman575
September 11, 2012
” I am wondering if people who work at the AOC even understand what is happening, any more than people who work at the courts understand is happening. ”
Never talk down to us. Never.
Michael Paul
September 11, 2012
Justice Barbra, don’t be fooled by slight of hand. My AOC peers know something stinks. My court worker peers know something stinks. Many of the judges in this state knows something stinks and many people expect to eventually discover that a lot of public monies were absconded with by many of these insiders that keep re-appointing each other.
Frankly, many of us wonder if a whole lot of judges are missing the bus on what was really going down. These reports of mismanagement are cover for a greater evil. Someone needs to simply follow the money on every project.
unionman575
September 11, 2012
“Frankly, many of us wonder if a whole lot of judges are missing the bus on what was really going down.”
Me too Michael!
😉
Justice Barbra
September 11, 2012
I would never talk down to anyone. My point was that the rank and file of the AOC may not understand what is happening. I work with court staff and AOC line staff, and I have the utmost respect for them.
Wendy Darling
September 11, 2012
The rank and file of the AOC understand perfectly what is happening.
unionman575
September 11, 2012
Then choose your words with a little more care.
The OBT
September 12, 2012
The AOC continues to waste your taxpayer dollars. I have yet to get any clear answers on these issues: 1) Has Vickrey finally left the building? If not what has he been doing and was the AOC paying him for consulting ? 2) Based on public records Ms CCMS Calebro retired at a higher base salary than other regional “managers” were paid . If so how did that happen and who authorized that ? 3) Who authorized that OGC lawyers could telecommute from Europe and the midwest. Are these lawyers back working at 455 Golden Gate? 4) Has the sweetheart deal with Clark Kelso been terminated? 5) Is the AOC still paying the National Center for State Courts around a half million dollars a year for what exactly? 6) Judicial education programs have been cut back and moving to more web based training. Has there been a reduction in the judicial education unit that is consistent with the reductions in judicial education programs? 7) How many temp employees is the AOC continuing to employ? 8) With the appropriate cutback of courthouse construction projects has that unit of the AOC been downsized ? 9) Why are all Judicial Council meetings conducted at the crystal palace and members flown to San Francisco when the AOC has the technology to have video conferencing? 10) Does Ms Patel get some kind of hotel housing allowance or other housing considerations? I was hoping all the well informed regulars at JCW could help me with all this so I didn’t have to write a letter to Justice Hull via the US Mail lol.
Been There
September 12, 2012
And is Dennis Jones still on the AOC payroll so he can wrongfully gain CalPERS service credit?
C’mon, Sacramento Superior Court, end this disgrace and pay your court exec from your own budget.
Robert Turner
September 12, 2012
Dennis Jones retired as the SAC Court Exec in Jan of 2012. I think he now draws his full Sac retirement with Sac County and his AOC retirement as well from the good people of CA. The Sac Bench did a recruitment for a new Exec Officer but I am told they did not like their candidates. Not sure where the Sac Judges are now in finding a replacement for Mr. Jones.
Dennis brought with him a number 2 man named Ed Pollard and he is the current court exec for Sac Superior Court. I don’t know who pays his salary but I would bet it is Sac Superior Court.
As I recall, the SAC Court reimbursed the AOC for the cost of Mr. Jones’s salary. It was a very odd deal. But on the bright side for Dennis, with two retirements from CA perhaps he can maybe afford a second home in Scottsdale Arizona to drink and golf with his peers.
Judicial Council Watcher
September 12, 2012
Published in the post above: The AOC’s telephone directory which we’re told is more accurate about positions than anything that can be requested from pubinfo in terms of employment.
Nathaniel Woodhull
September 12, 2012
Too true JCW. It was only after accessing the Serranus website years ago that I stumbled upon the AOC roster. I questioned a former Regional Director regarding the number of people shown in the directory and never got a straight answer. That was a significant red flag. They still insist on publishing every employee’s name in this directory and the numbers they publish never add up to the numbers of employees shown.
Wendy Darling
September 12, 2012
Yet another example of the AOC’s hypocrisy of say one thing, do another, General Woodhull.
wearyant
September 12, 2012
A brief scan of the directory shows Todd Torr has rejoined us on the mainland … perhaps. We should all give him a jingle and welcome him back to town. 😀
And the category, Enhanced Collections, now that’s funny. Can they get blood from a stone? I’m thinking of my stoned, ne’er-do-well nephew who’s been fined thousands of dollars on his many court cases. There are many, many more like him.
Love the category, “Misc. Numbers.” The court of appeals and supreme court are found there. You can divine their importance to the AOC. Just a few errant thoughts today. And, Good Afternoon, Everyone!
Wendy Darling
September 12, 2012
Call Todd Torr’s AOC number and you will get a recorded message, every time.
wearyant
September 12, 2012
Ahh, well, TT is still takin’ care of business in Geneva, isn’t he? Damn, I was hoping this was one document that didn’t have the thumbprint from the ministry of truthiness on it.
unionman575
September 12, 2012
http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://www.fox5sandiego.com/news/kswb-court-reporters-cut-from-san-diego-court-rooms-20120910,0,1212968.story&ct=ga&cad=CAcQARgAIAAoATAAOABAxsvAggVIAVgBYgVlbi1VUw&cd=VlQSv7SKQvQ&usg=AFQjCNFOrUkNqGFyq6Ju6O1zWa4eJsoHfg
By Sharon Chen Fox 5 San Diego Reporter
10:40 p.m. PDT, September 11, 2012
SAN DIEGO – Facing an unprecedented budget cut of $33 million, San Diego Superior Court officials will be eliminating a number of services, including stenographers.
Starting November 1st, the jobs of 41 court reporters will disappear from civil court rooms along with their legal transcripts.
Men’s Legal Center attorneys Craig Candalore and Wayne Rice object strongly to not having a verbatim record of court proceedings.
“I’m a little bit in shock,” said family law attorney Candalore. “When it comes to the final point you really need that transcript. You’re going to have he said she said or whatever litigants are going to disagree and you’re probably going to have to go in front of a judge to re-litigate.”
Court officials said there will be no alternative to the eliminated court reporters. Any party who wants records of the hearings will have to pay for one.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to be on the backs of people that really need some state services,” said Rice.
The cuts in court could boost Rosalie Kramm’s business. With 21 stenographers, Kramm Court Reporting is one of the biggest agencies in San Diego who employees court reporters.
“My plan is to hire on laid off court reporters,” said Kramm. “You have to have some way of creating a record.”
Kramm began court reporting in 1981, four years later she decided to build her own business based on her skills.
“We also have reporters in San Francisco and Los Angeles,” said Kramm.
The going rate for a freelance court reporter is $350 for a half day to $750 for a full day. According to state law, tape recorders are not allowed in court.
Wendy Darling
September 12, 2012
The San Diego Superior Court won’t have court reporters, but you can bet the farm that Mike Roddy will be flying up to San Francisco on October 16 at taxpayer expense in order to “meet” Patel, Soderlund, and Child for like the umpteenth time.
Serving themselves to the detriment of all California.
Long live the ACJ.
Wendy Darling
September 12, 2012
Speaking of money growing on trees, apparently there is also plenty of money at 455 Golden Gate Avenue to waste on outside law firms, despite having scores of attorneys in the AOC’s Office of General Counsel. What do they do exactly?
Published today, Wednesday, August 12, from Courthouse News Service, by Bill Girdner:
Ninth Circuit Briefs Completed in CNS Challenge to Ventura Clerk
By BILL GIRDNER
Briefs are now complete in the Courthouse News challenge to Ventura’s court clerk over delays in access to newly filed civil complaints, a traditional area of news coverage.
“As evidenced by the many courts that already provide it, ensuring journalists have access at the end of each court day to the day’s new civil complaints is fundamentally a matter of will,” said lawyers from the Bryan Cave law firm, representing Courthouse News.
“This lawsuit was only necessary,” according to the brief filed Wednesday, “because of the Ventura Clerk’s stubborn refusal to budge from his position that he will not allow access until after full processing.”
Reviewing the day’s new filings at the end of the day is a traditional part of beat coverage by a courthouse reporter.
The tradition is respected in all the federal courts in California and a host of state superior courts from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Bakersfield to Fresno and others in between.
Ventura, on the other hand, has hewed to the policy of the central authority of the administrative office for California’s courts, moving early, for example, to adopt cumbersome software called the Court Case Management System that turned into a white elephant after costing taxpayers a half-billion dollars.
The Ventura clerk, Michael Planet, refused to allow journalists to review the new cases until they were entered into that case management software, a process that ran from two days to one week and sometimes longer. By then, the court complaints were old news.
Last year, Courthouse News challenged the clerk’s policy in federal court in Los Angeles on First Amendment grounds. But Judge Manuel Real threw the case out, saying the matter was for state courts and he should abstain.
An appeal to the Ninth Circuit followed.
The Bryan Cave team argued that Real’s ruling took away the federal courts as a place to enforce First Amendment rights against state officials.
“At issue in this appeal is the continued availability of a federal forum to address systematic violations by a state court of the First Amendment right of access to public court records,” said Bryan Cave lawyers Roger Myers, Rachel Matteo-Boehm, David Greene and Leila Knox.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed an amicus brief supporting Courthouse News.
The delays imposed by the clerk “constitute an impermissible burden on the media’s right to collect and disseminate the news and severely curtail journalists’ ability to do so in a manner that serves the public interest,” wrote Lucy Dalglish, Gregg Leslie and Kristen Rasmussen for the reporters committee.
Representing Ventura’s clerk, Robert Naeve with Jones Day argued that the First Amendment issues were novel and should have been decided first in state courts.
The lower court ruling “recognized that requiring state courts to guarantee `same-day access’ would impermissibly entangle federal courts in the administration of the California judicial system,” said the brief authored by Naeve, Erica Reilley and Nathaniel Garrett.
Jones Day is often described as a “white shoe” firm, representing large business clients at very high rates. Jones Day has handled a number of cases for the courts in California, where the central administrative office normally coordinates and pays for the representation.
The central court administrative office employs a large staff of lawyers and has the option of seeking representation from the state attorney general. It has chosen instead to employ a private firm to represent court officials. In recent months, the administrative office has also been pleading with the Legislature and the governor for more money.
As lawyers in the case noted, the Ventura clerk’s alternative to fighting press access tooth and nail, and spending a large amount of public money in the process, was to grant journalists the traditional access provided by all four of California’s federal courts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego, as well as state courts up and down California.
In their Ninth Circuit briefs, the Courthouse News lawyers said Judge Real’s decision tossing the case gave intransigent state court bureaucrats a free pass to violate the First Amendment with impunity.
The Bryan Cave team pointed to a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Melinda Harmon in Texas who granted no such deference to the Houston clerk and ordered him to provide the press with same-day access to all new civil complaints filed in Houston’s state court.
They also quoted from a seminal Ninth Circuit case, Green v. Tucson, saying abstention doctrines, such as the ones relied on by Judge Real, should not be transformed into “a broad swath through the fabric of federal jurisdiction, relegating parties to state court whenever state court litigation could resolve a federal question.”
On the clerk’s side of the case, the Jones Day lawyers argued a number of factual points, saying that the clerk handled thousands of documents, that it was simply too expensive to speed up processing of the cases so that journalists could review them, and that only courts that allowed electronic filing could provide same-day access.
In reply, the Courthouse News lawyers said clerk Planet had constructed an alternate factual landscape, not unlike the holodeck of science fiction, in order to support their argument.
In fact, the Ventura court handles on average less than 10 new civil unlimited complaints in a day, noted the Bryan Cave lawyers. That number is roughly one tenth of the number of filings that the Houston clerk must provide for press review on the day of filing, under federal court order.
They also pointed out that Courthouse News had never asked the clerk to speed up processing, as his argument would lead one to believe. The news reporters were asking to see the cases ahead of all the administrative steps that accompany a new filing, at no cost to the court.
And they slammed the clerk for suggesting to the Ninth Circuit judges that only courts with electronic filing could provide same-day access, a position blatantly inconsistent with the many courts that provide same-day access to paper filings, including the federal courts in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The assertion that electronic filing is required for prompt access also runs counter to decades of traditional, same-day access provided by courts throughout the United States long before the advent of the Internet or electronic filing.
In their main brief, the Bryan Cave team pressed the point that under the lower court’s ruling, journalists could no longer go to federal court to enforce the First Amendment against state court officials.
“Parties seeking to prevent or cure such violations cannot seek redress in federal court, but must instead be left to enforce their rights in the very state courts that are denying them,” they wrote.
“This result undermines the First Amendment right of access itself, a right this Court has consistently upheld and is critical to our system of open government, a hallmark of our democracy since our nation’s founding.”
http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/09/12/50215.htm
**************************************************************************************************
“In their Ninth Circuit briefs, the Courthouse News lawyers said Judge Real’s decision tossing the case gave intransigent state court bureaucrats a free pass to violate the First Amendment with impunity.”
That’s not the only thing that state court bureaucrats get a free pass to violate with impunity. Heck, if you can get a free pass to embezzle public funds with impunity, it’s probably a slam dunk to get a free pass to violate the First Amendment with impunity.
Long live the ACJ.
wearyant
September 12, 2012
Holy Shit! I’m so glad the newspapers are fighting this dull-minded clerk in Ventura. The thought of bureaucrats interferring with First Amendment rights is beyond appalling. Anyone who has been following this circus occurring with the third branch, including the CCMS debacle, knows Michael Planet is a good foot soldier, an ass-kisser of the JC’s AOC and the CJ’s office. May the right side (correct party) prevail in this issue. Oh, you might be able to find Michael Planet on Match dot com, if you’re interested.
Robert Turner
September 12, 2012
Way to go press! The fact that CCMS sucks and takes a long time to update should not be a reason for the press to be denied the ability to share the content of those pleadings with the public. That’s another example of providing the press/public with “access to justice.” Once again the AOC has a strange interpretation of defending access to justice. I think they have it wrong and are spending big time taxpayer money on attorneys trying defend a bad system in Ventura.
Mike Planet was a huge, I mean HUGE, supporter of CCMS. So it is funny that he would prefer to defend the delays CCMS creates for clerks in inputing information over just giving the press access to the data in paper form. That’s unfortunate.
What’s really bad is the AOC is paying top dollar for outside attorneys to fight this in Federal Court. Just settle out of court that Ventura should provide the press access to these filings the day they are filed. It’s not a technology issue. It’s an access issue.
That said, I wish the Feds would say they have jurisdiction in this matter and many other matters mentioned here at the Judicial Council Watcher. Put the CA Courts into receivership like they did with the CA prisions. That’d get the legislature and governor’s attention to maybe wake up and fix things in the administration of CA Courts. It’s that bad.
wearyant
September 12, 2012
We all know that it really would be no big deal to set aside the physical civil filings in an area where they could be retrieved for the newspapers to review, then taken back to that area. The access issue is a nonstarter. There’s much more involved behind the scenes for the snaky sneaky JC’s AOC and CJ office. WHEN will the Feds investigate this mess?
wearyant
September 12, 2012
You’re right, the CA Courts should be put into receivership as they did with the CA prisons. But NOT with J. Clark Kelso as receiver! 🙂 Yes, Robert Turner, it is that bad!
Wendy Darling
September 12, 2012
Yes, it really is that bad.
And apparently, the State Legislature couldn’t care less.
Long live the ACJ.
unionman575
September 12, 2012
Perhaps W.V or R.O. are available to be the receiver.
Those 2 former Directors I’m sure could “help”.
“Mayday”…
https://judicialcouncilwatcher.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/meanwhile-back-at-the-aoc-money-grows-on-trees/#comment-13718
unionman575
September 12, 2012