A.G. Gancarski
Tuesday’s Lenny Curry transition team budget meetings continue with a foray into Court Administration with Sam Mousa and Judge Mark Mahon.
1:55: A discussion of the new courthouse and the ability to bring services in-house, related to family court services.
1:56: “The growth area is in paternity.” Children born out of wedlock, et al.
1:57: They need more case managers and better technology. “Woefully understaffed,” they want four new FTE; they could use more, but the city is in “lean times.”
2:00: The city has never given the Fourth Judicial Circuit a dime. That will have to change. Tobacco cases have been an impact. Caseload has constricted physical and other resources. They need assistance in court administration to fill the gaps. Other issues: a decrease in funding from fines, being charged IT (and now they have one dedicated IT person, who has submitted a resignation letter as per requirements).
2:08: The state may restore two case manager positions that were cut in 2008.
2:09: A discussion of reclassification of court positions to city positions, as was done in Hillsborough, Volusia, and Orlando.
2:14: On to the General Fund line items for the courts. Building allocations, et al.
2:17: “The General Fund pumps in $4.4M,” says Mousa.
2:20: Smartboards and evidence cards are now being discussed as part of a “state of the art” courthouse, which allows jurors to see confessions and other material evidence. These “expensive items” are the “future.” Wondering if Mousa will make the case that they could or should wait for the price point to come down further on these items.
2:23: We can’t just tell a judge to wait because we don’t have a card.
2:25: Still some hard feelings about the courthouse furniture controversy from a few years back.
2:32: Apparently, this department has been using flip phones for the last several years. IT had an allocation for new phones that no one informed them of. The Information Technology meeting is going to be red hot; There has been a lot of “turnover” in the Information Technology Division.
2:36: There have been complaints that not enough fines are brought in on ordinance violations. They brought in a guy to assess fines, to a degree that his salary is paid, plus some undetermined extra.
2:42: Teen Court and Juvenile Drug Court are grant funded; these requested positions are to be paid for out of the General Fund. Shari Shuman wants to know the ROI for this move.
2:47: Apparently, the Hillsborough General Fund is not fully funding 57 positions, as was implied earlier.
2:48: Court Administration wants more discretionary spending ability.
2:50: A discussion of the need to work through the foreclosure backlog. The banks aren’t pushing for hearings because they don’t want reduced value on the books; residents don’t want to be pushed out of their houses. Still, the public interest is to get these cases through. There were 17,000 cases in the backlog at its peak. Now, it’s down to 7,000.
2:54: There are always emergent needs: divorce, foreclosure, family law. They need latitude in the budget to adjust on the fly.
