Dec. 13, 2009
There just aren’t enough hours in the day to absorb all the ludicrosity (yeah, I made that word up) that abounds in California state government.
I’m back on the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), which has taken over operation of county courts in the last decade. And which came up with the brilliant (dripping sarcasm) idea of closing those courts one day a month in order to save money this year.
Now, I see they’ve been busy giving out raises to some of their 900 employees while continuing to pursue a $2 billion computer system and they’re pushing ahead with new courthouse construction.
Let us pause for a moment to mull the idea that the AOC was created to bring greater efficiencies to county court operations. It now has 900 employees, while our courts are closed one day a month, cases are backlogged and if we could fill our vacant judgeships, there’s no staff to run a courtroom.
Oh yeah, that smells like California style “efficiency,” doesn’t it?
Pause over.
A few other AOC tidbits that make me go, “Hmmmm.”
Courthouse maintenance contractors were recently discovered by an AOC employee to be unlicensed. These contracts were in the $15 million to $18 million range, so proper licenses should not have slipped by in the details.
Considering AOC has insisted on keeping direct control of its construction projects, the license fiasco leaves me wondering if they’re up to the task.
The question has direct bearing on Kern — the AOC recently announced it would build a new 40,000-square-foot courthouse in Delano for $42 million.
That’s more than $1,000 per square foot.
When I asked about that, AOC spokeswoman Teresa Ruano, told me a courthouse isn’t a run-of-the-mill office building.
“You have to have security features, blast walls, separate hallways for courthouse personnel, holding cells,” she said. “With two prisons so nearby, we’ll need to accommodate a holding cell capacity that’s much larger than in other areas and that’s just part of what a courthouse handles.”
OK, but $1,000 a square foot still sounds stratospheric, especially if the land is donated by other public entities, which is likely.
Kern County Superior Court Judge David Lampe, and other judges, agree something is amiss at AOC.
They’ve banded together to form the Alliance of California Judges and are calling on the Legislature to set things right by putting into law a trial courts bill of rights, which the Judicial Council was supposed to do when the AOC was created.
The bill of rights would draw boundaries around the AOC’s authority.
The Alliance also wants an advisory group to oversee the AOC and for “whistle blower” protections to be extended to AOC employees.
Lampe is also demanding to know what legal authority the AOC had to move $68 million out of the trial court trust fund and use it for its computer project.
But it’s the AOC pay raises, detailed in a Daily Journal article, that really ticked off the judicial world.
In a few cases cited in th article, AOC employees received 10 percent raises.
“At the same time, they asked judges to take a voluntary 5 percent pay cut and give it back to the AOC,” Lampe said.
Most of our local judges instead donated 5 percent of their pay to a fund used for Kern’s courts.
“Now you can see why they did that,” Lampe said.
The AOC responded to the Daily Journal article saying that most raises weren’t that high (why, the majority of cost-of-living increases and “merit salary adjustments” were only in the 2 percent to 5 percent range), they only had a small number of promotions and the overall growth of the agency was 3.35 percent in fiscal year 2008-2009.
They didn’t dispute the part of the article that showed overall AOC payroll had increased 6 percent in that same time frame.
Oh, and the article quotes an internal AOC memo from director William Vickery saying that because merit raises were smaller than past years and employees weren’t given an additional cost-of-living increase last fiscal year, they would get three extra paid days off.
Sputter!
Someone call NASA because clearly these people are from another planet.
Cost-of-living increase? Extra paid time off?
How about: Take your furlough and pay cut like the rest of us and be glad you have a job!
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/
home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com
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