Judges’ war reignited by budget cuts

By Dan Walters

When California Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature took another bite out of the state court system to balance the state budget ― on paper, anyway ― they reignited a political war between rival factions of judges over financial priorities.

The fight began when rebel judges organized themselves as the Alliance of California Judges and opposed former Chief Justice Ron George's commitment of vast funds to a statewide computer system with chronic operational shortcomings while trial courts were being forced to curtail operations.

After George retired last year, his successor, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, inherited the controversy. She pledged a more collegial approach, and there was a housecleaning at the Administrative Office of the Courts, including retirement of the AOC's director, William Vickery, whom the rebel judges saw as their chief antagonist.

However, with additional state budget cuts, the war over priorities continued, focusing on what the critical judges said was a bloated AOC bureaucracy that was consuming too much money and was being shielded from the cuts being imposed on local trial courts.

Cantil-Sakauye appointed a former colleague on the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento, ex-Justice Arthur Scotland, to head a "Strategic Evaluation Committee" that would weigh allegations of administrative bloat and seek a truce with the rebels.

That then put Scotland in the middle of a verbal firefight over the AOC's alleged refusal to give the critical judges detailed information on its spending, including salaries of staffers.

Scotland ordered the AOC staff to comply with the data requests, but the critics said the staff still stonewalled them so that they could not fully respond to a questionnaire from Scotland's committee.

"I can get a list of all the judges in the state in an hour," Sacramento Judge Kevin McCormick told one legal publication. "I find it impossible to believe they can't provide me a list of who works for them in a time frame of less than a month."

This week, San Francisco's presiding Superior Court judge, Katherine Feinstein ― daughter of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein ― joined the critical chorus, complaining to Cantil-Sakauye in a letter that she had been misled by the AOC in handling last year's budget cut.

The San Francisco courts, she said, delayed layoff plans at the AOC's request because, she was told, it would imperil a pending political deal on funding.

Instead, state financing was slashed more, and now, Feinstein told Cantil-Sakauye, she contemplates "near total cessation of our civil operation and the dispatch of 177 of our employees to the end of California's lengthening unemployment lines."

Feinstein asked Cantil-Sakauye to "reallocate substantial branch resources," thus endorsing the demands of the Alliance of California Judges.

Dan Walters is a columnist for Sacramento Bee. He can be reached at dwalters@sacbee.com. For back columns, visit www.sacbee.com/walters.