Legal News

With Senate Passage of Sales Tax, Court Closures Averted

By Brian Harris

By Amaris Elliott-Engel
Of the Legal Staff

After the state Senate passed a bill that will allow the city of Philadelphia to close a $700 million gap in its five-year fiscal plan by deferring pension payments and raising the city sales tax, the specter of courthouse closures, cop layoffs and shuttered libraries has been lifted from Philadelphia.

The Senate passed the bill Thursday, a day before the Mayor Michael Nutter administration had planned to send out layoff notices to 3,000 city workers and begin implementation of a balanced budget required under the law and by the oversight authority that approves the city's budget for reasonableness.

Nutter had said earlier this summer that funding for the First Judicial District, the District Attorney's Office and the Defender Association of Philadelphia would have been slashed in order for the city to balance its budget.

It was never totally clear whether defunding the criminal justice system was a political gambit to push action in Harrisburg after months of delay on the bill or not. But FJD Court Administrator Dave Lawrence said he "received no indication from any of the parties involved that it was not a real threat."

The FJD was planning to work off of its "continuing of operations plan" that is in place to guide court operations during disasters, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Pamela Pryor Dembe said in an interview prior to the passage of the bill. Dembe has previously said courthouse closures would engender a lawsuit with the FJD as plaintiff.

Lawrence said the continuing of operations plan is a plan that would guide the court system if it lost a building or had some other crisis and had to triage its essential functions related to "life and liberty."

"It deals with bail setting. It deals with dependent children. It deals with emergency guardianships," Lawrence said.

If the court's budget stays at its planned $99 million for this fiscal year, no layoffs or days of closures will be required this year, Lawrence said.

Lawrence said he would make an immediate request for the city to transfer money into the court's procurement account so the court can pay its bills. That budget is paid in payments around $4 million every quarter.

The court's interpreters, office suppliers and drug labs have continued to do work without being paid, Lawrence said. But he said: "I need to get some money rolling."

Lawrence said court administration will turn its full attention, once past the vagaries of the budget issues, to the city's prison population, a unified family court building and continuing to implement new programs to improve the court operations.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on September 18, 2009 (boomark / email).