More on NY Justice Courts

Looking at the full report (download pdf here) from Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye and Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman, some interesting ideas are to be found.

1. No recommendation is made to increase justice pay; but each court will need to have equipment upgrades (computers, digital audio recorders, fax machines, etc.)- the report calls for an additional $10 million.

2. Justice courts are responsible for $210 million per year in revenue- without any real accounting oversight. Part of the Action Plan requires
Auditing and Financial Control
∙ Require that justice courts transmit their monthly revenue reports to the State Comptroller electronically
∙ With the State Comptroller’s Office, develop financial control best practices for the justice courts
∙ Require local governments to submit to the Office of Court Administration copies of their annual justice court audits, and expand State auditing of justice court fiscal operations

3. Court security is a highlighted area:
Increase annual funding of the Justice Court Assistance Program to $5 million (from the current $1 million) and allow localities to apply for capital grants to upgrade justice court security

All told, the $10 million requested for the 2007 budget represents less than 5% of the revenue generated and may well be paid for with some strict auditing procedures.

Overall, Upstate Conservatives are against increasing judicial pay from the County Court level on up. Although this particular report doesn't address the pay raise issue, we are looking at this closely. Justice court funding is part of local budgets, supplemented with state funds. Any call for increased justice compensation would certainly result in higher local taxes.

The Action Plan does call for "Supervising Judges" to be appointed by January 1, 2007 for each of the eight Judicial Districts outside New York City (page 33). It's not clear whether these are new positions (very likely) or are additional duties for existing judges (unlikely), but either way, these are additional costs for taxpayers to bear.