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

Posted on January 23, 2013

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Along with the 32 people who were onboarded in the month of December, we learned in early January that this process of onboarding temporary and contract workers is ongoing at the AOC. What really floored us though is our own head count analysis that put the AOC’s authorized FTE’s (Full Time Employees) at 815 and a proposed budget that increases that to 844 authorized positions in the next fiscal year, adding two million dollars to the AOC’s budget to fund these positions. We mentioned this in several other posts as comments.

In the history of the AOC, there has never been a reorganization that did not result in all of the following:

1. An increase in head count over at the AOC.

2. “mission creep” – the AOC unilaterally expanding its area of authority, oftentimes without legislative or judicial council approval.

3. The creation of more management slots in the reorganized groups

4. A permanent increase in JC \ AOC \ appellate \supreme court funding (ie the old state court system)

5. Higher pay for everyone with the title of supervisor or above because mission creep is not limited to the AOC as a whole, but it happens all across the AOC in all divisions. All of these added responsibilities regularly justify higher pay for that stellar management team that commissions these workload and compensation surveys. The more bullshit the managers jot down for those commissioned to perform the study, the higher the pay they justify for themselves.

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.

Even more amazing is the old state court systems ability to issue a budget change proposal to add personnel that will be permanently factored into their future budgets while the trial courts hold out a dashed line representing their head count with no ability to alter that head count with a budget change proposal. Instead, it is merely a pot of money divvy’d up among the 58 trial courts.

The neuropsychological detriment of that dashed line to budget movers and shakers is the purported independence of the trial courts to alter those figures as they see fit which conceals that more than two thousand court employees that lost their jobs, while San Francisco gets to claim unfairness of the dashed line getting so much of the judicial branch budget.

Something is seriously wrong with judicial branch budgeting but you already knew that. We believe that the dashed line of what is being funded employee-wise in the courts is the crux of the issue. Nobody understands why the AOC stands to gain 29 additional employees next year when more than 30 times that many employees will be losing their jobs. Literally, for every new AOC job, more than 30 court workers will lose their jobs.

Chief Justice – Where are your priorities?

 

 

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Posted in: Administrative Office of the Courts, AOC, Flapdoodles & Pravda Propaganda, Judicial Council of California, State of California, Trial Courts