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When the county judge cornered me at Gambles the other day and told me he wanted to talk to me, I feared the worst. Judges are usually like certified letters and mysterious noises from your car -- an indication that expensive trouble is on the way.
Fortunately, it turned out that the Honorable William P. Alderton was irked by a recent effort to shaft rural Colorado.
Colorado is divided into 22 judicial districts, whose district courts handle the big cases. The smaller stuff -- traffic offenses, small claims, misdemeanors, preliminary hearings on felonies -- goes to county courts.
Our 63 county courts are divided into four administrative categories. Denver is Class A. Big counties -- El Paso, Pueblo, Jefferson, Mesa, etc. -- with full-time county judges are Class B. The rest of us fall into Classes C and D, with part-time judges.
These part-time judges are currently paid on a
percentage basis, derived from their caseload. For example,
a judge whose court terminates
1,200 cases annually
gets 50 percent of the $78,000 salary of a full-time Class
B county judge, and is expected to put in a 20-hour
week.
That seems somewhat reasonable, at least when you're talking about paying lawyers, and it gets adjusted every year. Now enter the Honorable Anthony F. Vollack, chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court and thus head honcho of the judicial branch of our state government.
He persuaded State Sen. Dottie Wham, a Denver Republican, to carry SB 144, which sets new compensation standards.
The new pay scale would not affect full-time county judges in the urban areas. But it sure clobbers rural judges. The Montezuma County judge's pay would be cut from $62,400 to $39,000. Kit Carson from $46,800 to $15,600. Alamosa from $62,400 to $42,900. The total annual rural county judge payroll would drop from $2.4 million to $1.4 million -- while urban judges' pay would not be affected.
Alderton noted that Chaffee would go from $54,600 (70
percent of full-time) to $27,300 (35 percent), although no
current judge's salary would be cut during his term. But
I won't go again if this goes through. At these pay scales,
qualified people won't become judges. We'll get kids just
out of law school, or semi-retired people who may not have
much energy.
The rationale for the lower rural pay apparently comes
from a Weighted Caseload Study,
which has some
interesting data. For instance, it assumes that if a
full-time county judge handled nothing but civil cases, she
could terminate 5,300 cases a year.
Assuming she never took a vacation or attended a conference, that works out to about 24 minutes per case. I realize that our judicial system often proceeds at the pace of glaciers and could use some prodding, but 24 minutes barely covers the time it takes to enter a default judgment when one party doesn't show up, let alone schedule and conduct a trial.
Vollack's own judicial-compensation study group, headed
by a district judge, observed that The committee feels
that it does not have sufficient confidence in the weighted
caseload model, or sufficient other information to
recommend which numbers should be used in the
statute.
So Vollack is proceeding on numbers that his colleagues don't trust, and further, he proceeded in secrecy . Alderton said rural county judges were never officially informed of this plan to reduce their pay.
We were all at a conference last September when he
could have mentioned it,
Alderton said, but we
learned about it because the new pay plan was distributed
to the 22 chief district judges, and some of them leaked it
to us county judges.
So we have a new compensation plan that sticks it to rural judges but not urban judges. It is based on numbers that nobody (except maybe Vollack) trusts. And Vollack never bothered to inform rural judges of his plans to cut their pay.
Many of us have enough trouble maintaining any
confidence in our judicial system -- look at Henry Nieto in
Gilpin County, convicting juror Laura Kriho of
obstructing the administration of justice
for not
answering questions she wasn't asked.
But maybe we shouldn't be surprised at that contrivance of a thought crime and its sad implications for our jury system. Look at the shabby way our state judicial system treats its own rural judges. Mere citizens, even conscientious jurors, certainly aren't going to get better treatment.
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