Editorial

Success of Missouri courts depends on adequate resources

Thursday, February 2, 2006

Each year, the chief justice of Missouri is honored to give a "State of the Judiciary" speech to the state legislature. While this year I spoke primarily about the important values of having courts that are professional, fair and impartial, and prompt. The media focus, not surprisingly, was on my request for a modest increase in the Judiciary's budget.

The health of the rule of law in Missouri depends on attracting highly able women and men to public service in the Judicial Branch of state government, and we need to give adequate compensation to employees who have soldiered on through five years of lean budgets.

The simple truth in Missouri is that we cannot give the level of performance that our citizens expect -- and deserve -- without a budget that is sufficient to allow the courts to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities.

We share the hope expressed recently by our Governor and our legislators that Missouri is emerging from the difficult fiscal times that have been so challenging for the past five years. During this time, the Judiciary has tried to manage its resources well. Today, the judicial branch receives about 1.6 percent of the state's budget -- less than the percentage of the state's budget that we received 20 years ago. During that same period, however, our responsibilities have increased; for instance, juvenile officers have been added to our budget to relieve county governments of some of the burden of supporting local courts. In the past 10 years, as our workforce has decreased, our trial court case filings have increased 23 percent, largely involving breach of contract claims filed by businesses, landlord-tenant disputes, domestic relations cases and criminal charges.

Our state courts continue to improve technology, consolidate local court functions, maintain specialized court programs and make other efforts to be efficient. But we cannot maintain our effectiveness without retaining our well-trained clerk staff, which we increasingly are unable to do.

A visit to your local courthouse will show the effects that our recent budget restrictions have had on our clerks, who are the frontline personnel and the true face of our court system. Turnover in their ranks has reached an alarming rate, particularly in urban and suburban areas where the annual turnover rate is as high as 17 percent. Even in rural areas, where salaries are still more competitive, we experience significant turnover.

Throughout the state -- in both rural and urban courts -- we have seen an actual decrease in the worth of salaries as wages fail to keep pace with the cost of living. We hope the legislature will adopt the Governor's proposed 4-percent cost-of-living increase to assist the courts in retaining many of these frontline employees who are so important to our effectiveness.

The budgetary constraints of recent years also are taking a toll on our state's judges, who now face their sixth year without any pay increase or even a cost-of-living adjustment. In fact, Missouri is one of only four states in the nation that has not given its judges any increased compensation during this time period.

We all know that the calling to public service involves financial sacrifice.

But when the gap between the private sector and public service gets too large, good people will not sacrifice their families' financial interests to answer the call. This stagnation of judicial salaries is having a negative impact on our ability to attract the state's best lawyers to judicial service to provide the best service to our citizens.

There now are Missouri attorneys fresh out of law school who are paid more in their very first legal jobs than some state trial judges before whom they appear. For Missouri lawyers older than 36 years of age, the average salary is as much as one and a half times that of a state Supreme Court judge. While our state has attracted and retained -- through increased compensation -- many fine state-paid law professors, university administrators and other similarly talented public sector professionals, we have seen the opposite in the Judiciary. In recent years, some of our best jurists -- including some from the Supreme Court -- have moved on to much more lucrative jobs in the private sector, and the number of lawyers applying for judicial vacancies has decreased substantially.

My greatest fear is that we will lose the ability to attract enough of the state's finest lawyers and clerks to public service in the Judiciary. The legislature has broad powers to repeal laws, but it cannot repeal the economic laws of the marketplace. Full recognition of these economic laws shows the way to ensuring the competent, impartial and well-run courts that our citizens expect and deserve.

For more information contact: Beth S. Riggert (573) 751-4144. or e-mail her at beth.riggert@courts.mo.gov