Set forth below is a letter sent to Justice Carol Corrigan, chair of the Chief Justice’s Futures Commission.
The Commission is accepting public comment on 15 concepts in advance of a public hearing scheduled for February 8-9. Many of these concepts, conceived behind closed doors with the assistance of AOC staff, will harm the Judicial Branch and should be permanently shelved.
We encourage you to weigh in on these issues before it’s too late. The Commission is scheduled to meet when most of us will be in our courtrooms doing our jobs, but it is essential that judges be heard on these concepts. We are concerned that the Commission may interpret silence to be acceptance. You may submit your own individual comment by sending an email to FuturesCommission@jud.ca.gov.
Directors, Alliance of California Judges
_________________________________________________
Honorable Carol A. Corrigan
Chair, Commission on the Future of California’s Court System
455 Golden Gate Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94102
Dear Justice Corrigan:
We are the Alliance of California Judges, a group of 500 judges committed to the preservation of judicial independence and the reform of our branch administration. We offer these comments in response to the 15 “concepts” offered for discussion at the Futures Commission’s upcoming meeting.
At the outset, we note our fundamental disagreement with the basic premise reflected in much of the Commission’s commentary on these concepts—that the problems confronting our branch stem from a lack of uniform practices and central control. Proposals include systems to be implemented statewide, including “a transferable case management methodology to support all courts throughout the state.” Many of these suggested approaches feel like the time-worn ideas long promoted by the AOC. Our concern is that the work of the Commission is being driven by the AOC’s agenda to impose uniformity and extend its reach into local court operations.
We have a different philosophy. The mentality that bigger is better, central control is better than local administration, and uniformity is better than diversity, is what led to a series of administrative disasters culminating in the spectacular failure of CCMS. It’s what caused the AOC staff to mushroom in size from 225 positions in 1992 to over 1100 employees and temps in 2010. It’s what led the State Auditor to conclude in 2015 that the AOC has “spent Judicial Branch funds in a questionable manner” and has “not sufficiently justified its current budget and staffing levels.”
We have these comments as to certain specific concepts:
Concept 3 involves “trial court administrative support.” The stated goal of this concept is to “[e]xplore and identify the most cost effective staffing model for the provision of trial court administrative services.” The authors point out that “trial courts have complete budgetary discretion regarding how they staff to provide [administrative] services.” We don’t consider local discretion over budgetary matters, or local variation in “staffing models,” to be a problem.
We read this concept, and the one that follows, as a push for expanding AOC control over local trial court operations.
The drive for expanding the role of central administration runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Government Code, § 77001, which requires the Judicial Council to establish “a decentralized system of trial court management” and provides for “local authority and responsibility of trial courts to manage day-to-day operations” and “[c]ountywide administration of the trial courts.” It also flies in the face of the SEC report, which envisioned a smaller central bureaucracy more responsive to local needs.
We believe that local court leaders are in the best position to manage their budgets and run their courts. We are disappointed that the Commission is not considering a fee-for-service approach for the AOC—as recommended by the State Auditor in her 2015 report—which would allow local courts to decide which services they receive from our central administration, paying only for those services.
Concept 4 encompasses “trial court employment and labor relations.” The authors complain of the “great variation in trial court terms and conditions of employment” and urge the Commission to rethink “existing labor practices” in order to flatten out “court-to-court variations in employment terms and conditions.” The Commission will explore “the costs and benefits of different models of bargaining.” The commentary specifically includes statewide labor bargaining as a potential strategy.
We join with our court staff in expressing our grave concern with this suggested approach. Given the wide variation in how our local courts operate, we question whether statewide uniformity in labor practices is workable or desirable. Moreover, we’re concerned about the encroachment of the AOC into local court management through statewide collective bargaining. The AOC can’t engage in statewide bargaining unless it has statewide authority over labor issues such as compensation, hiring and discipline. If we give the AOC the authority to negotiate contracts on a statewide level, we surrender local control over human resource management.
Concept 5 is a call for “a cost-effective official record in all case types.” We read this concept as a disturbing push for more electronic recording in our courtrooms and fewer court reporters. We firmly believe that a certified shorthand reporter preparing a paper transcript provides the most accurate record for the parties and the strongest bulwark against false complaints of judicial misconduct. Anyone who has listened to an electronic recording of a court proceeding knows that it is no substitute for a reporter’s transcript. Moreover, further steps to reduce compensation to reporters will leave California struggling to find certified reporters, already a huge problem in states like Illinois and Pennsylvania, leaving courts with no option but to compromise due process by using unreliable and undecipherable electronic recordings.
We find one sentence in the commentary for Concept 6—“Technology-Enhanced Courts Proceedings and Online Transactions”—particularly frightening:
“Courts are unable to share information across jurisdictions and some are even unable to share information within the same jurisdiction, due to incompatible case management systems. . . .” [Emphasis added.]
We are deeply concerned that the Commission will propose a statewide case management system along the lines of CCMS, the failed technology project that cost the taxpayers half a billion dollars and brought our branch to the brink of financial ruin. According to the latest human resource metrics, the AOC currently employs the equivalent of 143 full-time employees in information technology. We are dismayed that the Commission contemplates an even greater role for our central administrators in technology management when they should be looking to vacate the field.
We are disappointed that the Commission will not be considering many of the proposals set forth in the 2012 SEC report or the 2015 state audit. Nothing suggests that the Commission even considered an audit of the billions in court construction funds, scaling back the AOC’s staffing levels, or moving the AOC’s headquarters to Sacramento, let alone the fee-for-service model or the democratization of the Council itself. We sincerely hope that the Commission will take up these ideas in the weeks ahead.
Sincerely,
Judge Steve White
President
Judicial Council Watcher 
unionman575
February 3, 2016
Nice work ACJ and JCW once again.
It’s another smoke filled room special from the Death Star.
“Concepts”? It’s another AOC, oops, I meant JC power grab attempt.
😉
Wendy Darling
February 5, 2016
Today’s installment of Tani’s Follies. Published today, Friday, February 5, from Courthouse News Service, by Maria Dinzeo:
Hot-Button Ideas Set for Monday Meeting on Future of CA Courts
By MARIA DINZEO
(CN) – A fundamental philosophical difference over how California’s courts should operate in the future is expected to come to a head in San Francisco on Monday. The line of contention runs between those who would seek to centralize the vast court system and those who defend the independence of California’s local trial courts.
The Commission on the Future of the California Court System was set up last year by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. She appointed roughly 50 voting members made up of judges, clerks and lawyers, and named Supreme Court Justice Carol Corrigan as the chair.
Early proposals coming out the commission have raised strong opposition from judges and labor unions over what they see as the outline of another incursion into local court operations by a centralized bureaucracy, a notion rejected by Corrigan.
“If you looked at a movie about a courtroom in the old west or in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ you would recognize that courtroom as pretty similar to what we do most days in California,” she said. “We’re now in the 21st century. It’s legitimate to ask, ‘What can we do better?’ Then we will do nothing more than give a report to the chief justice and it’s up to her to decide what, if any, ideas have merit and what will she carry forward.”
Those decisions are put in place by a web of committees appointed by the chief justice and a large administrative staff, in the past called the Administrative Office of the Courts and now rebranded as the “staff” of the Judicial Council, a rule-making body where most members are appointed by the chief justice.
The staff is the San Francisco-based central bureaucracy of the courts, with roughly 800 employees, that has been the frequent target of searing criticism from the state Legislature and from trial court judges, particularly those in the Alliance of California Judges. The group was founded in 2009 and now counts a membership of roughly 500 judges.
“The more you remove judges from administering their courts, it potentially hurts our independence and hurts the legitimacy of what we do,” said Judge David Lampe who sits in Bakersfield and is a founding director of the Alliance. “The more that can be kept local, the better.”
Lampe said the Alliance’s concern is with preserving the independence of local judges in keeping with the provisions of the 1997 Trial Court Funding Act. The legislation established a system of statewide funding for the trial courts, but it also required the Judicial Council to set up “a decentralized system of trial court management.”
The president of the California Judges Association, a more longstanding group of judges whose members at times overlap with the Alliance membership, said his group started raising concerns about the commission’s ideas late last year.
“Many courts have expressed great concern about thoughts to centralize human resources, labor talks and administration,” said Judge Eric Taylor, the CJA’s president. “These are complex issues involving sensitive local relationships in vastly unique courts across our state. The way of CJA is to fully collect and discuss information on all pertinent topics in order to take meaningful positions.”
Another line of attack on the commission’s early work has come from labor unions.
California courts employ thousands of workers and some of the ideas floated by the commission, such as the centralization of labor negotiations, raised criticism from labor leaders who also see the old AOC’s hidden hand.
“The Futures Commission is speculating that centralization rather than local autonomy will achieve savings,” wrote Michelle Castro in an email on behalf of the Service Employees International Union. “But given the bureaucracy’s track record of centralization debacles and its history of waste, we are doubtful. Again and again, the central authorities target frontline service providers for cuts, which means that services are degraded and the public suffers. This is no different.”
Included on the commission’s Monday’s agenda are three controversial subjects: the centralization of labor negotiations and hiring policy, replacement of court reporters with automated recorders, and the sharing of case information along with a concern about “incompatible case management systems.”
That last agenda item raised the ghost of a massive, failed effort to create docketing software common to all California trial courts, called the Court Case Management System. The project cost California taxpayers more than a half-billion dollars and became a bête noire of the California Legislature, the CJA and the Alliance.
Included among the names on the future commission are three clerks with deep roots into the past, Mike Roddy, Michael Planet and Jake Chatters who all cooperated closely with the AOC to install the problematic and labor-intensive software in courts where they worked.
The software project was fought tooth and nail by the Alliance.
“We are deeply concerned that the Commission will propose a statewide case management system along the lines of CCMS, the failed technology project that cost the taxpayers half a billion dollars and brought our branch to the brink of financial ruin,” wrote Alliance president Judge Steve White in a letter sent Tuesday to Justice Corrigan.
“The mentality that bigger is better, central control is better than local administration, and uniformity is better than diversity, is what led to a series of administrative disasters culminating in the spectacular failure of CCMS,” wrote White who sits in Sacramento.
But Corrigan distinguished the work of her commission from past administrative endeavors and any suspicion of an underlying agenda. “This is not an implementation group. It’s an examination group,” she said. “This undertaking is nothing like CCMS.”
Corrigan added that the concepts that will be discussed at Monday’s public meeting originated from judges and court clerks, not from AOC staff members, via a survey sent out statewide last year. “The notion there are some hidden bureaucrats with an agenda who are driving this is simply not the case,” she said. “Every single response went to the judges, justices and court executive officers on the commission. They reviewed those suggestions themselves.”
Lampe with the Alliance acknowledged that point.
“We understand these are just concepts. We know there’s no proposal for implementation at this time. But these ideas being advanced sound to us like ideas that have been advanced historically by the staff and the AOC that reflect increased control by state administration,” said Lampe. “So we just want to be on the record of stating that in the comment process, so members are aware that a substantial number of judges are concerned and have always been concerned about this.”
The other agenda item on centralizing employment policy and labor negotiations caused a separate reaction from a group of nine unions representing court workers, saying it makes no sense to dismantle a local employment structure built over many years.
“The current trial court employment structure was created through a very deliberative and meaningful process that considered efficiency of administration, employee rights and interests, as well as the unique nature of each individual county-based trial court,” the letter says. “The existing system allows trial courts and their employees to address their own needs based on their local circumstances and workloads.”
The third controversial item on the agenda, replacing court reporters with automated recorders, was questioned by trial judges as well as labor.
“It’s been a long standing effort of the AOC to increase electronic recording,” said Lampe. “We as judges have experience with both electronic recording and court reporters. There’s no comparison. The electronic recording is a mess, you can’t make sense of it. Until somebody invents the technology that will literally transcribe everybody’s words as spoken without confusion, so be it. But it doesn’t exist now. So we see these proposals as being vestiges or a continued effort that we’ve seen in the past.”
On that point, Corrigan said it’s the commission’s job to explore all sides of every idea, even the old ones.
“Wonderful, well-meaning people have said ‘why don’t we try this,’ and at first blush it looks like a great idea. And then we launch that idea without looking at what does it cost us. One of the reasons we’re asking the questions is periodically people come up with these ideas and then they get kicked around for years or decades. We’d like to be able to say we studied that idea and it cost us ‘x’ or it would cost us ‘y.'”
The supreme court justice said she understood the judges’ reservations and concerns about the commission’s work masquerading as a bureaucratic power grab.
“There are people, and not without some historical foundation, who just assume that’s the way everybody rigs the system,” she said.
Corrigan pointed to a 2009 effort to take away the authority of the local courts to choose their own presiding judges and head clerks and transfer that power to the central bureaucracy. “That was greatly controversial, and legitimately so,” she said. “However that didn’t happen. And that’s not what we’re trying to replicate.”
http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/02/05/hot-button-ideas-set-for-monday-meeting-on-future-of-ca-courts.htm
Long live the ACJ.
wearyant
February 5, 2016
Oh, WendyD, thanks for posting Maria Dinzeo’s usual excellent write-up on the latests horrors in the third branch. It’s pithy for the length considering all that must be covered to get the true state of current affairs. She handles mention of those three CEOs, bought and paid for by the “staff,” so much classier than I would. Only expletives come to mind when I think of those cretins. As usual, so obvious that no care for the public is within these concepts. Same old 78 rpm record goin’ round and round until the greedy creeps force what they want down our throats. Which, incidentally has nothing to do with the quality of justice eked out from our courts. Speaking of class, the feckless queen certainly has brought that level down since her coronation. Suggesting that the court clerk OR THE JUDGE manipulate the electronic recording equipment is not exactly showing respect to the judges.
Long live the ACJ
unionman575
February 6, 2016
I feel CCMS 2 coming on fast…
Lando
February 6, 2016
As the great Abe Lincoln said ” You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”. No trial Judge proposed any of these concepts. We all know from well documented history that the continued calls for centralization of power comes from 455 Golden Gate and the unelected hand picked insiders that dictate policy to the largest judicial system in the world. Sorry J Corrigan. I am afraid no one is buying what you are selling.
Wendy Darling
February 6, 2016
What Lando said.
Long live the ACJ.
wearyant
February 8, 2016
Unionman575 is right on again. Same dog and pony show with different speakers, same ol’ buzzwords that the bureaucrats love to invoke, which is, save the public funds for them and their excesses (ergo, remaining in obscenely high priced San Francisco) by eliminating core services to the public in the same ol’ ways. They still believe if they make misstatements often enough, they will eventually be accepted by the sheeple and others who are frankly too damned busy to keep after these creeps year after year! Same lies about court reporters are usual and misrepresentations about electronic recording. So sad. Too bad. Yeah, too bad for the public. Jody’s pet dog, Spot, referring cozily to The Chief was a real hurler. Oh, my. For me, this whole breaking down of the California court system is great incentive for any thinking person to remain or become law-abiding at every frickin’ level of government. That’s the only plus I see of allowing the greedy bureaucrats to continue to run amok in the judicial branch. A citizen does not want to become involved with our justice system! Disgusting! 🐜 (Feel free to stomp on the ant.)
Long live the ACJ
Wendy Darling
February 8, 2016
Today’s installment of Tani’s Follies. Published today, Monday, February 8, from Courthouse News Service, by Maria Dinzeo.
Quote of the day: “ The goal of our work at the end of the day is to facilitate informed decision-making.” Justice Carol Corrigan
Note to Justice Corrigan: No, it’s not about informed decision-making. It’s about taking away autonomy from the trial courts and concentrating more control and power in the Office of the Chief Justice. That is the only thing Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye is really interested in. She just won’t admit it. Just like the last Chief Justice before her. If it was really about “informed decision-making”, the Chief Justice would be pursuing ways to democratize the Judicial Council. But that, of course, is “off the table.”
California Court Workers Rail Over Centralization and Machines in Think Session
By MARIA DINZEO
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – On Monday, trial court workers and court reporters lined up in fierce opposition to what they see as efforts to centralize the way courts are run and replace human court personnel with machines.
The Commission on the Future of California’s was created in 2014 by California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye to find ways of running California’s courts more efficiently, with an eye toward economy and innovation.
At the outset of a public comment session Monday, commission chair and California Supreme Court Justice Carol Corrigan said no idea was off the table.
“We know that change is hard and it can be scary,” Corrigan said. “Especially when you’re in the middle of it.”
She added that the commission’s task was to recommend ideas to Cantil-Sakauye, and to give an informed opinion on whether those ideas will work for the courts.
“Sometimes the most important aspect of any inquiry is answering why and doing so in concrete terms,” Corrigan said. “What would this new idea accomplish? What will it cost us? What are the potential downsides? What are our recommendations for weighing those competing interests? The goal of our work at the end of the day is to facilitate informed decision-making.”
Court reporters from up and down the state sharply criticized a proposal to examine the costs and benefits of recording court proceedings electronically. The commission’s Monday agenda broadly outlined a need to create a verbatim court record, and noted that in civil and family court cases no record is currently required by law.
The concept proposes possible statutory changes to allow recording by machine in such cases, especially in family court where litigants may not be able to afford to purchase the transcripts created and owned by court reporters.
Brooke Ryan, a court reporter in Sacramento and president of the California Court Reporter’s Association, asked the commission to reject electronic recording.
“Let me be clear, electronic recording devices provide a less effective, less reliable, less accurate and incomplete court record,” Ryan said. She gave as an example Sacramento Superior Court, where recording devices fail to pick up the voices of female judges.
“Why would you allow someone’s legal rights to be jeopardized because of an obsession with low-level technology, technology that has proven to be ineffective time and time again?” Ryan said.
Carolyn Dasher, a court reporter from Los Angeles, told the commission that her county’s streaming transcript indicated that some soft-spoken judges’ remarks hasn’t been captured by the recording device.
“That would never happen if there is a live court reporter in this room,” she said.
Kimberly Rosenberger with the Service Employees International Union said an electronically produced transcript could be a good supplement, but should not be a replacement.
“Electronic recordings are often incomplete, inaccurate, the current technology is costly, time-consuming and problematic for a number of reasons,” Rosenberger said. She noted that transcripts for meetings of the Judicial Council, the rule-making body of the courts, are unreliable and costly to produce.
“We fully embrace technology. We want to make it clear that it should be used supplementing our personnel not replacing them,” she said.
Rosenberg also spoke forcefully about another controversial item – whether to centralize labor negotiations. She tied the concept to a proposal floated in December to bring court human-resources policy under the purview of the Administrative Office of the Courts, the San Francisco-based central bureaucracy of the courts now called the Judicial Council staff.
At its December meeting, the commission said the idea had not come up in any of its subcommittees and that claims it had were based on “misinformation.”
“We were told it wouldn’t be on the table. But yet here we are the following Futures Commission meeting discussing it,” Rosenberger said.
She urged the commission not to change the current system of negotiating labor agreements, currently done with the state’s 58 trial courts individually.
“The current system in place is one of the most well-researched collaborative and constitutional HR systems in the country,” Rosenberger said. She noted that while the commission’s proposal pointed to inequities in pay for court workers by county, it’s because court workers are competing with other government jobs.
Debbie Pearson, an Alameda County Superior Court employee and local SEIU chapter president, said it would be near impossible to implement a one-size-fits-all approach, as each collective bargaining unit understands who it represents and the needs of the employees it represents in each court.
“It’s pretty hard to keep track of one court, let alone 58, so I think that it does an injustice to the courts, the trial courts, to bring it under one roof,” Pearson said.
She added that Alameda County’s collective bargaining unit was recently able to win a pay raise for the court’s workers by negotiating directly with the court to stay within its budget, which it would not be able to do if negotiations were centralized.
One speaker, a former Administrative Office of the Courts senior attorney named Michael Fischer, said the commission should not be afraid to do things on a statewide basis. The demise of the Court Case Management System, a failed effort to create docketing software common to all California trial courts, had made everyone skittish, he argued.
“The argument is that all statewide solutions are flawed because one was not successful,” he said, adding, “History is replete with examples of initiatives that failed at first, yet eventually became routine.”
The project, criticized by judges, court employees and the legislators as a boondoggle, cost California taxpayers more than a half-billion dollars before the Judicial Council pulled the plug.
Jerry Garcia, a court employee in Alameda County, compared the centralization of labor to CCMS.
“CCMS didn’t work. I was a part of that. So I would just urge you to consider what is happening with each of our counties,” he said. “Each situation that’s different, the different people and the different employment that’s given in each county is different. I don’t think it would be justice to centralize it.”
http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/02/08/california-court-workers-rail-over-centralization-and-machines-in-think-session.htm
Long live the ACJ.