[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - With a comment period closing this weekend, more than 90 percent of respondents are in favor of pressing ahead with reforms that would pare down and rein in the central bureaucracy of California's courts.
"Please implement immediately all of the SEC recommendations forthwith," Judge David Brown from San Diego wrote. "This dilly-dallying is unacceptable. Show some leadership - you are destroying the judiciary as directly as the budget. To borrow a phrase from advertising - just do it."
As of Wednesday, 153 out of 168 comments, mostly from judges, support immediate action from the Judicial Council to adopt the recommendations of the Strategic Evaluation Committee, a group of judges appointed by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye to review how the Administrative Office of the Courts operates.
The committee's scathing report was unveiled last month, but the Judicial Council voted to delay implementation of the proposed reforms, much to the vexation of judges up and down the state. They have flooded the Judicial Council's online public comment box with exhortations to cut the AOC's workforce, eliminate unnecessary divisions and ensure that the agency serves the courts, not its own purposes.
"In more than twenty years as a superior court judge, I have observed with concern, disappointment, and disgust the creation and growth of the AOC into an unresponsive, unnecessary, and irresponsible organization purportedly supervised by a feckless and equally irresponsible Judicial Council," wrote Judge Robert Perry in Los Angeles. "The AOC is more than just an embarrassment. It is a travesty."
Some Judicial Council members had expressed concern that a restructuring of the bureaucracy would harm people who depend on its services. They also worried about feelings hurt by the report's blunt language. The council ultimately voted to call for public comment before moving forward.
But the resulting flood of comments showed a judiciary weary of surveys and studies, and ready to get moving. The words "immediately" and "urgently" are common, as is the phrase "without further delay."
Presiding Judge Suzanne Kingsbury of El Dorado County, one of the SEC report's authors, wrote, "Every program and service offered by the AOC provides a benefit to some constituency. In the process of receiving comments about the SEC report, I am certain that the beneficiaries of these programs and services will implore the Judicial Council not to implement any reductions or eliminate any programs."
"However, when courtrooms are shut down and clerks' offices hours dramatically scaled back, no one benefits," she wrote. "The AOC simply cannot be all things to all people, particularly in light of the current economic crisis. The Judicial Council cannot avoid making these tough decisions."
The result of a year's worth of research and interviews, the report highlighted many criticisms judges have held about the agency's wasteful spending, generous hiring and telecommuting policy while courthouses were closing and laying off staff and its bungling of a massive statewide IT project for the courts. It also found the bureaucracy had hid information about its finances and the number of workers it employs.
Comments come from judges and commissioners all over the state, some retired, and many with over 20 years of bench experience.
"Please learn the lesson. Implement all recommendations. Preferably, yesterday," wrote Judge Joseph Hurley of Alameda County Superior Court.