(CN) - Senate budget subcommittee chair Loni Hancock on Thursday took issue with a $10 fee the courts' administrative office wants to assess for every public file request, and questioned why the courts' central bureaucracy is trying to push higher fees on the public while also spending $2 billion on a new courthouse in Long Beach.
"If there were high fees for an investigative reporter the Watergate scandal may never have been revealed," said Hancock, a Democratic senator from Oakland. "Piecemeal fee increases can add up to a real lack of access for reporters, for low income and middle income people as they seek our justice system."
The fees have been called "efficiencies," by the bureaucrats from the administrative office, and the senator poked fun at the obfuscation.
"Now we're saying `efficiencies' when what we mean is, 'We're increasing fees and cutting services'," she added in an interview. "It's very important that we have transparency in government and I'm just saying what we're talking about."
Hancock, added that the administrative office, that often promises transparency, appears to be working against transparency in government.
"So in the interest of transparency in a democracy as well as access to justice for all people, it's of great concern to me to increase those fees," she said. "Ten dollars for each name is quite a lot and there were also some duplication fees, a dollar a page. Given the size of filings that can be prohibitively expensive."
Michelle Castro with the Service Employees International Union said her union is also concerned about higher fees.
"We want to make sure that public records are easily accessible to taxpayers and those fees aren't so prohibitive that only those who have money can have access to them," she said. "It's just a bad direction we're going in. It doesn't seem right to cheapen the quality of services the public gets because of budget cuts."
She added that the judiciary should look at efficiencies that "make sense," suggesting that courts may want to look at the ratio of managers to court employees.
Hancock did agree with the argument put forward by most judges and bureaucrats in the judiciary, that the legislature needs to reconsider the amount it is willing to fund the courts.
"Watching what is happening to our justice system is a major concern," she said. "The judiciary is literally the third branch of our constitutional democracy and it's being whittled away fee by fee, courtroom by courtroom. We used to spend considerably more money on our courts and we need to get back to a level of funding that's adequate."
In the morning on Thursday, her committee heard arguments from lobbyists from the courts' central administrative office pushing for new fines, fees and service cuts that are currently included in trailer bills attached to the 2013-14 budget.
The administrative office's director, Steven Jahr, cast the courts' plight in Dickensian terms. "The fact of the matter is a person who is starving will eat rotten food rather than starve to death," he said.
Hancock chuckled when Jahr referred to the increased fees on the public as "efficiencies."
"We're talking about cuts here, so yeah, 'efficiencies,' " she said with irony.