The State of Kansas Courts
| Publication year | 2010 |
| Pages | 08 |
THE STATE OF KANSAS COURTS
By Lawton R. Nuss, Chief Justice Kansas Supreme Court, Topeka
In August the Kansas Supreme Court ordered a weighted caseload study to be performed in all Kansas district courts on all types of cases. Later this year, the Court will appoint a Blue Ribbon Commission to consider the results of the study, review the operations of the Kansas Judicial Branch and make recommendations for possible changes. It has been said that the changes have the potential to be the most dramatic since court unification in 1977.
Now that I have your attention, I will explain how this happened and elaborate on what it may mean for the state.
Recently we have been living in extraordinary economic times. They have called for extraordinary measures. For example, last spring my colleagues and I were forced to close all state courts and send employees home without pay for four days. The reason: insufficient funds. This was a first for Kansas in its 149-year history. Because about 98 percent of the Judicial Branch budget is for salaries, much of our significant cost-cutting unfortunately comes at the expense of our personnel and, as a result, our ability to serve the citizens of Kansas.
Another event important to the Judicial Branch also happened last spring. A legislator asked, "Just how much money will it take for the Supreme Court to keep state courts open during the fiscal year" beginning July 1, 2010? We were asked to be realistic, given the hard economic times. We gave each legislator this "realistic" figure and a majority agreed to fund it. But the realistic figure required us to maintain 75-80 of our existing 135 job vacancies for the entire year. This represents approximately 5 percent of our authorized nonjudicial work force. In other words, the hiring freeze we were forced to begin in December 2008 would not be thawed completely.
Still another event important to the Judicial Branch happened during the last legislative session. The Legislative Division of Post Audit delivered its report to the five state senators and five representatives on the Legislative Post Audit Committee. Among other things, the audit report recommended that Kansas' existing 31 judicial districts be consolidated into 13 districts for a purported savings of $6.2 million, or be consolidated into seven districts for a savings of $8.1 million. These recommendations included resultant changes in numbers, and geographic locations, of many...
To continue reading
Request your trial