SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Answers to a massive survey of 3,500 judges and officials in California are due in early August as part of the chief justice's promised overhaul of a bloated court bureaucracy. The answers will almost certainly reflect the long-building anger within judges working in the state's 58 county courthouses, and the ongoing battle for funds that have been pared back by the Legislature.
"The trial courts have been cutting over the last six to eight years and the AOC has done nothing but grow," said Los Angeles Judge Robert Dukes, referring to the San Francisco-based administrative office. "In my view, we should cut the AOC to the point where they no longer exist before we cut the trial courts."
The survey was sent last week to 3,500 judges, justices, lawyers and court clerks who will evaluate the structure and function of the Administrative Office of the Courts, a bureaucracy that has been under fire for months over its size and spending as local courtrooms around the state are forced to close.
Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye set up a committee headed by retired appellate Justice Arthur Scotland to ask questions and make recommendations. "There needs to be a top to bottom evaluation of the AOC," said the chief justice in an interview earlier this year. "The AOC doesn't need to do all the things it does, it seems to me."
Scotland said the survey questionnaires from the Strategic Evaluation Committee do not ask the recipients to "protect or defend" the AOC but "are designed to allow us to have an objective and meaningful assessment."
"We're inviting every judge to provide their views on the AOC and we've gone beyond that," he said, adding that the anonymity of the survey "encourages candor."
At last week's meeting of the Judicial Council, the governing body for California's courts, judges argued that the trial courts are much more critical to the operation the judicial branch as opposed to the nebulous tasks of a vast bureaucratic agency.
"Additional reductions to the AOC may be made as we see what the 2012-2013 budget looks like," Los Angeles Judge David Wesley said at the meeting. He argued that the council should also be free to make more cuts to the bureaucrats' budget after seeing Scotland's report.
In a memo that accompanies the survey, Justice Scotland says his committee is conducting an in-depth review of the organizational structure, methods of operation and budget of the AOC.
He says the committee will assess the AOC's priorities and operating methods, and decide whether changes should be made so the agency fulfills its core functions in a cost-effective and transparent manner.
"I clearly fall on the side that the AOC needs to cut much much deeper," said Dukes in Los Angeles. "The context I think the survey has to be placed in is what services, given that if we continue to fund the AOC at the amount that its currently funded and your court will be cutting its own ability to serve the public, what services would you like to see stopped?"