SACRAMENTO (CN) Survey answers from Sacramento's trial judges have direct bearing on a budget working group meeting in San Francisco Wednesday to assess $350 million in cuts to the judiciary's overall budget. Trial judges called on Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye to institute sweeping cuts to the staff of the bureaucracy, close its three regional offices and impose salary freezes on all its employees.
The chief is also urged to revamp the Judicial Council, that stands nominally above the bureaucracy, by appointing dissenting judges and opening internal committee meetings to the public. One trial judge suggested that the council, by closing its committee meetings and limiting dissenting voices, "seems afraid of comments particularly those that are critical."
The budget working group meeting on Wednesday was closed to the press, despite two specific requests to attend from Courthouse News.
In describing the Administrative Office of the Courts as "arrogant and retaliatory," suggesting the agency's primary ability is to usurp power, challenging the agency's competence and calling for the disbandment of "an unproductive, unnecessary bureaucracy," the answers reflect a deep-seated anger with the roughly 1,000-person agency that acts "in its own interests, rather than in the interests of the branch."
Ratcheting up the heat, the trial judges criticized the "opulent and spacious work site" and "exorbitant salaries" of the bureaucrats in their San Francisco sanctum while jurors and ordinary Californians work in "relative shabbiness" when giving free service to the state and the judicial system, after first paying the taxes to support it.
In another context, the comments would be jaw-dropping in their untrammeled strength and white-hot anger. While the 29 Sacramento judges who answered the survey do not claim to represent the view of the Sacramento court as a whole, the fact that they comprise half the court's bench is striking.
Along with those in Orange County and Los Angeles, the Sacramento trial judges have also formed a tidal wave of criticism running against a vast, complex and expensive IT project promoted by the bureaucracy. The Sacramento judges call the project a "debacle" and "one of the most disgraced and mismanaged computer systems this state has ever seen."
Like the those from Orange County, the contemptuous evaluations are bred from familiarity. Sacramento is an "early adopter" court that embraced the new IT software under the direction of a former presiding judge.
Many judges in Sacramento, Los Angeles and Orange County have credited the new chief justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, with a willingness to ask for their opinion in considering how to go forward in a time of financial stress.
"There needs to be a top to bottom evaluation of the AOC," said Cantil-Sakauye in an interview earlier this year. "The AOC doesn't need to do all the things it does, it seems to me."
As part of that evaluation, the chief sent a survey to trial judges throughout California, asking them to tell her what they think is wrong and suggest some concrete solutions. She has gotten an avalanche of mail.
`Bloated' Bureaucracy
The Sacramento judges turned most of their criticism on the AOC, beginning with the sheer magnitude of its staff, which many responses described as "bloated" and "unnecessary."