At last month’s Judicial Council meeting, San Francisco Presiding Judge Katherine Feinstein sought to convince the council to mitigate unsustainable budget cuts imposed upon California’s trial courts, and instead focus cuts on the Administrative Office of the Courts, a bureaucracy with no adjudicative functions. She was joined by representatives from other trial courts, and leadership of the 400-member Alliance of California Judges. A common theme was that cessation of one AOC project — the $2 billion California Case Management System that many believe will be obsolete well before deployment — would allow most if not all of the California courts to remain open for the foreseeable future. Additional cuts to the AOC’s budget would all but guarantee open courts.
The council and chief justice, despite earlier pledges that keeping courts open was their absolute top priority, again sided with the bureaucracy, by a vote of 15-2. $81 million legally available for the operation of trial courts this fiscal year instead stayed in the AOC coffers.
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