SACRAMENTO (CN) - A bill to restore financial control to individual trial courts cleared its first legislative hurdle Tuesday in the Assembly Judiciary Committee. Only one member voted against AB 1208, which its author, Senate Majority Leader Charles Calderon (D-Montebello), said will ensure that the state's 58 trial courts remain independent and autonomous in deciding how state money is spent.
"I am thrilled with the result," Calderon said in an interview. "There were a lot of negotiations going on even until the day of the hearing, and by the time we got to the vote it went how I expected it to go."
At the Tuesday hearing, Calderon testified at length that AB 1208, the Trial Court Rights Act, is a bill of financial-management rights for the trial courts, and will rein in the judiciary's Administrative Office of the Courts, a bureaucracy that has drawn ire from judges statewide for its spending, particularly on a mammoth court technology project whose cost is estimated as at least $1.3 billion.
Calderon said the Legislature had directed the Administrative Office of the Courts to draft a trial court bill of rights upon the enactment of the Lockyer-Isenberg Trial Court Funding Act of 1997.
"They were supposed to do it and if that had happened we would not be here today," Calderon said.
"The reality is it has not been adopted. I only say that because its important to point out that the Legislature wanted independent decentralized trial courts and it has not been followed."
Calderon then noted the "number of problems with the AOC," saying it had grown from a small administration to a "bureaucracy of 1,100 members" which cannot possibly be properly managed by branch leadership on the Judicial Council.
Kern County Superior Court Judge David Lampe urged the committee to vote in favor of the bill.
Lampe, a director of the Alliance of California Judges, an organization of almost 400 trial judges that sponsored AB 1208, told the Legislature, "We need your help to get back to a balanced system that was promised 13 years ago."
Lampe said the AOC has diverted millions of dollars that were meant to keep courts running for projects such as its $1.3 billion Court Case Management System.
Judge Steve White, presiding judge of Sacramento Superior Court, said, "We support the idea of a unified court system, but we want the courts to run it, not bureaucrats who do not speak for the courts."
White spoke of the "self-absorbed priorities of the AOC over the trial courts," and said that two years ago the AOC asked the Legislature to impose furlough days on the courts while "transferring scores of money to CCMS."
Judge Bill MacLaughlin, the former presiding judge of Los Angeles Superior Court, said he was not an Alliance member, but was at the hearing to speak on behalf of his court, which overwhelmingly supports AB 1208.
"I want you to understand this isn't just an Alliance issue. I represent the establishment," MacLaughlin said.
MacLaughlin recently was appointed to an oversight committee established by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye to investigate the AOC.
MacLaughlin said he had been forced to skip that committee's first meeting to testify Tuesday.