State court officials were taken by surprise when Gov. Sonny Perdue eliminated funding for judges' and prosecutors' councils with a stroke of his pen.
|
ADVERTISEMENT
|
|
|
Have a thought?
Go to the Forums or Chat.
|
|
|
The governor wasn't trying to punish either council in his veto of their budgets, said spokeswoman Heather Hedrick. He wanted to send a message to the judiciary as a whole, she said.
In a news release last week, the governor was quoted as saying: "I expect the judiciary branch to live by the same means as everyone else, and I'm confident they can readjust their budget to meet the needs of the councils for prosecuting attorneys and Superior Court judges."
The prosecutors' budget is tucked into the judiciary budget, but it's separate, said Coweta Judicial Circuit District Attorney Peter J. Skandalakis, the chairman of the prosecutors' council.
The $5.47 million budget slash for the prosecutors cuts into muscle, not fat, Mr. Skandalakis said. The council's officers are meeting Wednesday to try to find some funds, but more than 90 percent of the district attorneys' budget is salary, he said.
The state's district attorneys rely heavily on their council not only for administrative duties, such as issuing paychecks and calculating retirement, but also to provide hands-on assistance, District Attorney Danny Craig said.
David Fowler, who runs the council's drug-prosecution division, said his staff helped recover $3 million to $4 million last year in forfeitures. That's drug dealers' money given to local law enforcement, he said.
The trial services division works with the state's prosecutors to research legal issues and provide those in the trenches with briefs and manuals. It also trains prosecutors and law enforcement, Mr. Fowler said.
"We're like the district attorneys' lawyers," he said.
The Council of Superior Court Judges provides similar services for the state's trial court judges.
Its $882,809 budget was also eliminated by Mr. Perdue's veto.
"He was not at all sending messages to those individual councils," the governor's spokeswoman said.
But those were the only places where the governor could use his line-item veto power in the judiciary budget, Ms. Hedrick said.
The judges' council takes care of the trial judges' administrative needs and other support, such as arranging the annual meetings.
The council is also supposed to play a critical role this fall toward accomplishing a goal of Mr. Perdue's: building accountability into the use of senior judges.
The governor, legislators and the judges' executive council moved to initiate changes after The Augusta Chronicle reported in December how little oversight is given to the practice of having retired judges fill in for sitting judges.
The Chronicle found that there is rarely a correlation between a judicial circuit's workload and the use of senior judges and that the system costs 200 percent more in Georgia than in similar-size states. Last year, senior judges billed state taxpayers for $2.4 million.
The judges' proposal to provide accountability includes tracking where senior judges are being called to work and examining workloads.
The council is to provide that service, council Director Molly Perry said.
Legislators proposed cutting $637,000 to $1.3 million in senior judge payments this spring.
"Due to separation of powers, Gov. Perdue's only tool for managing the growth of the judiciary budget is the line-item veto," Tuesday's news release said.
The trial judges were taken aback by the elimination of the council's budget, Ms. Perry said. It appeared the governor looked down the lines of figures and found the two that totaled how much he wanted and marked through them, she said.
Even with the cuts, the total judiciary budget still increases in the coming fiscal year, according to the governor's news release.
Reach Sandy Hodson at (706) 823-3226 or sandy.hodson@augustachronicle.com.
