JC/AOC – 2 million more to hire 29 more..

“What is typically missing as a number in that 0250 state judicial branch budget is the number of employees in the trial courts. If it is supposed to be a state funded system then the number of employees that the state is funding should be a part of the equation, yet year after year, the number of court employees in the budget has a dashed line in it, like there is no employees in the trial courts.”

Well, there is a reason for that…absent a statewide staffing formula based on weighted caseload, the JC/AOC is free to dispense funding for staffing on whatever basis they want. Play along with us, and you get $$$$. Don’t, and you will suffer the consequences.

The solution is a uniform weighted caseload staffing formula with full transparency…that is, every court knows what its staffing is supposed to be and what every other court’s is, too.

Hearing about the court workers that have lost their jobs and the remaining workers dealing with all work and stress really is disheartening. As a line worker for the crystal palace it’s so disturbing to see how mismanaged everything is. The reputation of the agency is so bad. I feel like I am guilty by association like I want to explain I am not a part of the inferior decision-making. As a line worker you are trying to just keep up with the all the work you have inherited. You are also trying to not see all the waste, the laziness, the meanness and the just collecting a paycheck behavior. Probably the worst part is all the unprofessional behavior is all out there so obvious and blatant. The management turns a blind eye. They don’t care about the line workers. They are just making sure they get their pensions and benefits. It is also sad that there are some people who are also in management that are good people (very few) but won’t try to make any changes on behalf of the little guy. They are either tired or just know nothing will come of their efforts, or basically don’t want to lose their jobs. So the line workers just have to suck it up. So working in an environment that caters to supervisors, managers and telecommuting attorneys is so discouraging. There are no changes, just the same bad behavior. It is a place where management is trying to create a façade to the public and also to its internal workers that the aoc is doing a self-inventory and really trying. It isn’t. It’s only trying to control the public perceptions and give the appearance. And all the line workers are given more work. More work of having to create charts, tables, etc. to offset what the SEC says. This is probably what is most disheartening. I am sure others have spoken about being a aoc line worker and feeling like nothing will get better. I wanted to share that it feels crummy feeling like you are a part of the problem that has created all this waste. In essence you are a line worker helping the agency create a façade. Management keeps people on the payroll that have performed very poorly and that have should have been let go long ago. Policy on telecommuting? Why is it ok to let attorneys telecommute four days a week? Why is ok to still let a supervising attorney telecommute three days a week? Why is ok to let attorneys come in very late and leave early as they please? Why are there work screw-ups? Well when you have an attorney come in really late and give you work that needs to be done at the end of the day and then you try to ask questions about the work but then come to find out that attorney just took off early. Well you can finish the train of thought. It always ends with the attorneys blaming the line workers for the screw-up. The policy is made up depending on who the worker is. Favoritism. Why is ok to use money to convert a conference room to an office for the finance director? Is this really true? Why is ok to be a manager and just sit in your office surfing the web till your retirement day? More importantly why is this happening and endorsed? So as a line worker it’s hard to believe any change is really happening. You feel crummy because you really know the truth that you are not valued and that you are disposable. You don’t respect the agency and the folks that are supposed to be running it. It is such a charade and you feel crummy being a part of it.

So Donna took ever-so-historically/ethically-compromised Kim Turner’s place and is now Tani’s “court re-engineering” maven. Sort of like how Jahr, with no relevant administrative experience, became the branch’s administrative expert overnight.

Tani’s version of recycle, repurpose, reuse. . .

I am admittedly a little harsh today, but really, I cannot believe how far the branch has fallen.

My friend JCA, you are not being harsh, I feel like bitch slapping someone too.

I am still trying to figure out how the JC/AOC can create a re-engineering division. Just exactly what does that mean? Hmm, what are they planning to re-engineer and under what authority do they have to engage in such activities? Maybe we will see yet another attempt by the JC/AOC to take over the selection of trial court Presiding Judges. As trial courts all over the state contract and lay off valued employees what in the world is the AOC doing creating any new bureaucratic positions and hiring over 60 new full time employees. It is the ultimate irony that the CJ claims in dramatic fashion “Don’t they know there aren’t any courts anymore ” while she is presiding over the continued unnecessary growth of an out of touch and increasingly bloated bureaucracy at 455 Golden Gate .The damage this CJ has done to the once proud and strong judicial branch of California is staggering.

Yes the damage is staggering. Ronald George knew exactly what he was doing. He picked his successor and in doing so picked someone that would be caught up with the power and trappings of office and who would never do anything to damage his “legacy”. Sadly the citizens of California pay the price. 4 hour drives to the courthouse. The clerks office closing at noon. Layoffs of our clerks office personnel and Commissioners. Courthouses being delayed or shelved. Meanwhile down at the crystal palace the “insiders” work to protect their privileges and power. In addition to HRH 2, J Hull works to derail those who dare dissent and J Rosenberg has become chief of insuring that the spin sounds great for those that populate the dark hallways of 455 Golden Gate. What a complete and total mess.

The OBT prior to the AOC latching on to this term, in a nutshell re-engineering was the term used for taking a close look at individual operational processes to determine if there was a way to streamline or improve the process. The desired result being improved customer service, written proceedures, and the most effective way to perform the task/process. I have no idea what this term means to the AOC. Certainly as I understand the meaning of the term, the AOC has not applied it to its operations! More than likely they mean to re-engineer the trial courts to their way of doing things.

There’s that “culture of control” thing rearing its ugly head again. Published today, Friday, January 25, from Courthouse News Service, by Bill Girdner:

Press Groups Attack Public Access Shell Game by Court Bureaucrats
By BILL GIRDNER

California court administrators are trying to create a new definition for public documents that appears aimed at limiting press access. News groups submitted comments Friday calling the change a “semantic sleight of hand” that undermines fundamental press and public freedoms.

“It appears the true purpose of introducing the concept of an `officially filed’ document into the Rules of Court is to provide the administrators with justification for denying public access to records that have been ‘filed,’ under the long-understood meaning of that term, until after they have been “officially filed,” wrote Rachel Matteo-Boehm, Roger Myers and Katherine Keating with Bryan Cave.

An officially filed document, according to the proposed rules, is one that has been “processed and reviewed,” in other words, worked on by civil servants who create a computer record and run through a host of additional procedures.

In Sacramento’s courthouse, those procedures take about six weeks.

The change in definition, slipped into proposed rules for electronic filing, appears intended to give officials an excuse to deny press access to newly filed controversies, until after all the bureaucratic tasks are done.

“The proposed rule change would thus give court administrators unbridled discretion to delay press and public access to fundamentally public records until administrators decide such access is appropriate — even if it is days or weeks after the ‘filed’ date,” said the Bryan Cave lawyers.

Their comments were made on behalf of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Californians-Aware, The First Amendment Coalition and Courthouse News Service.

“The Judicial Council should not countenance the definitional sleight of hand when the public’s access to court records — a right that is fundamental to the transparency of the judicial branch of our government — is at issue,” they said.

The quiet attempt to work a new definition of court records into e-filing rules is consistent with past policy of the Administrative Office of the Courts where its former director William Vickrey attempted a similar semantic shell game by referring to filed documents as “pre-filed,” in order to support his argument against prompt access by the media.

“In the proposed rules, the dubious notion of a ‘pre-filed’ document has been replaced with the equally dubious notion of an ‘officially filed’ document,” said the comment from the press corps.

Vickrey and his office came under fire from the Legislature and trial court judges around the state on issues that ranged from financial mismanagement to perceived arrogance.

He retired in 2011, his long-time lobbyist Curt Child was appointed head of operations last year, and the office was said to be reformed.

But the effort to create a new definition for court documents shows little tendency towards reform and instead continues the office’s old, restrictive view on public access.

Federal and state court rulings establish that timely access to public documents is part of the overriding First Amendment right. News loses interest to readers as time goes by and news outlets report new matters on the day they happen rather than a day, a week or six weeks later.

“It appears the primary — and perhaps sole — purpose of the `officially filed’ concept is to justify arguments by court administrators that the public has no right to access a court record until court staff deem it fit for public viewing,” said the press comments. “The access delays that would inevitably result would violate the federal constitutional right of timely access to court records and be contrary to the practices of state and federal courts around the nation.”

As an example of hot news tied to a court filing, football player Junior Seau’s family sued the NFL on Wednesday in San Diego and the news was reported by national sports pages that same day. But reporters could not get the document from the court because San Diego Superior Court delays access to court documents until they are processed.

That delay is contrary to courthouse traditions. Courts throughout the nation traditionally give journalists access to new filings, such as the Junior Seau matter, on the day they are filed, when the news is hot.

But that tradition has been under attack in local California courts that fell in line with the central administrative office and adopted its financially disastrous software for processing cases at a cost of a half-billion dollars in public money.

Orange County and San Diego are two of the California courts that adopted that cumbersome and now-defunct software, and both courts are now pushing electronic filing of court documents. Orange County, in particular, now requires that lawyers file electronically but nevertheless delays public access for a substantial amount of time while new matters are processed into that old software, called the Court Case Management System.

That mandatory e-filing program is the direct result of a bill passed by the California Legislature last summer that OK’d a pilot program in Orange County and said the experience from the program should shape statewide rules on e-filing.

But those new rules were written and proposed before the pilot program had even started, and now administrators are trying to push them through the courts’ policy-making body, the Judicial Council, when the pilot program is less than a month old.

“Assembly Bill 2073 explicitly requires the Judicial Council to adopt mandatory e-filing rules that are `informed’ by a study of the Orange County pilot program,” said the press comments. “But instead of following this mandate, the proposed rules were drafted and circulated before the Orange County pilot program even began.”

“The prospect of precipitously adopting mandatory e-filing rules is especially troubling in light of the recent debacle over the California Case Management System,” the comments continued. “Given the enormous amount of public funds spent on that failed project, caution is essential to ensure that the delays and inconsistencies in public access associated with CCMS do not carry over into the expansion of e-filing.”

In obtaining passage of the pilot program legislation, with the help of the central administrative office, Orange County court officials told the legislators that “E-filing makes the court records available faster and sooner to everyone, including the public.”

However, reporters who cover Orange County have found that not to be true.

In December, a two-day spot check of paper-filed complaints compared with e-filed complaints showed that the paper cases were actually processed more quickly by a day or two than the e-filed cases, a result that mirrors earlier surveys on the delays in access to e-filed, complex cases, often the most important and newsworthy cases in the court.

“After that court implemented e-filing for certain categories of cases, e-filed documents were not typically available until a day or two after their paper-based counterparts were accessible,” said the press comments.

When that discrepancy was reported in a news article late last year, Orange County court officials appeared to accelerate the processing of e-filed complaints and the delays went down. But by mid-January, the delay had again increased to two and three days between the time a case is actually “filed” and the time it is “officially filed.”

In one of the many aberrations that take place when administrators control press access, the most minor cases, referred to as limited cases, are processed first and appear more quickly for public view than the more important, or unlimited cases, that take much longer.

The press comments noted that while legislators were told e-filing would be “facilitating public access,” court administrators were instead using the legislation “as a hook to undermine public access.”

Press access under CCMS and now e-filing contrasts sharply with traditional press access in California and the nation.

Roughly a decade ago, news reporters in Orange County reviewed newly filed civil cases on the day they were filed at the end of the day, in a wooden box in the records room that was connected to the intake windows for new filings.

A survey of press and public access in courts around the nation, attached to Friday’s comments from press groups, shows that traditional, same-day press access remains the norm in most federal and state courts in the nation. The exceptions, as the survey demonstrates, are precisely those California courts that are rushing to implement electronic filing.

By contrast, federal courts have moved towards electronic filing while putting in place a host of local variations that preserve traditional, same-day press access.

Some of the federal courts send new filings directly onto public terminals at the courthouse without any processing from court officials, providing nearly instantaneous public access.

Other federal courts provide an electronic in-box that allows the press to review newly filed cases before they are processed, in other words when they are “filed” and before they are “officially filed” in the parlance of the new rules proposed for California.

Courthouse News has repeatedly asked officials in Orange County Superior Court to provide the press with access to the electronic in-box for new filings, in order to preserve the old status quo of same-day access for the press. The vendor for the e-filing service in Orange County has said such access is completely feasible, that it is simply a matter of the court’s discretion.

But that request has repeatedly been turned down by the Orange County clerk. Instead, the court’s pilot program has come accompanied by pre-written rules that, according to the comments from the press groups, appear aimed at justifying the ongoing delays in press access.

“Rights fundamental to the democratic process — like the right to know what goes on in the courts — are meaningless if they can be disregarded when they become inconvenient,” the press comment concluded.

“As history has taught us, rushing forward without taking the time to assess how these systems will actually work for all concerned is quite likely to result in a system that is worse rather than better.”

http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/01/25/54290.htm

Long live the ACJ.

There was an interesting article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that the Pentagon, facing serious budget cuts, has decided to release all of its temporary employees, in order to preserve the integrity of their long-term workforce. There’s a lesson and a message there, but it will fall on deaf ears at 455 Golden Gate Avenue.

Long live the ACJ.

“As independent constitutional officers, judges have a right and a responsibility to speak up and push for transparency and for a democratically elected Judicial Council.”

Exactly right, Judge McMaster. And as for those judges who have honored their right and responsibility to speak up, and been branded as “dissidents” as a consequence, telling the truth is not an act of rebellion, especially for a judge.

Still serving themselves to the detriment of all Californians.

Long live the ACJ.

I too am looking forward to retirement so I can get my First Amendment rights totally back again.