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Going to court could take longer and cost more under proposals being considered as North Carolina seeks to balance its budget.

A House subcommittee wants to eliminate the state’s trial court administrators and cut positions such as investigators and victim-witness coordinators in the district attorney’s office.

A variety of fees would be increased or added, bringing in nearly $58 million each year statewide, according to the draft budget submitted last week.

The increased court fees would include doubling the cost for foreclosures to $300 and adding a $130 fee for filing counterclaims.

Money from those fees would go to the state’s general fund.

Other fee increases, including civil processing and daily jail fees, would stay in the counties where they are assessed. Both would double, to $30 and $10, respectively.

Counties would stand to gain about $22.4 million from the fee increases, according to the draft budget. The fee increases would be coupled with millions in cuts, many of them positions that court officials say are crucial.

Guilford, the third largest of the state’s court districts, hired Jon Bellows as trial court administrator several years ago.
Bellows has been invaluable in taking over administrative duties, allowing the administrative judges for District and Superior Court to spend more time handling cases, said Chief District Court Judge Joseph E. Turner.

“I’ve been as active as I can to try to persuade legislators not to make that cut,” he said.

He credited Bellows with overseeing the modernization of the district’s system for summoning jurors and the renovation of the courthouse. He also credited Bellows with developing an operating plan in the event of a disaster so the courts would remain open.

Courts already have been running on slim budgets with a growing caseload. Judges handled more than 200,000 cases in 2009, about 10,000 more than the year before, according to the latest figures available.

That growing caseload has forced Turner to close civil court at times because there aren’t enough judges to cover when someone is sick or on vacation. In recent years, the state has cut hours to its emergency judges program, which is used to fill the gaps.

“I toyed with the idea of closing each of the courts a day at time to give us some leeway,” Turner said.

But the other judges convinced him to stick with civil court closings because courts such as criminal, traffic and juvenile would “jam up so quickly,” he said.

“We have cut back seriously each year that we’ve been under this economic decline,” said Guilford County District Attorney Doug Henderson.

Grants provide only limited relief. His office has lost two assistant district attorneys and a support person for handling domestic cases after a grant ran out.

“Times are bad for courts,” Henderson said. “But the courts have never been terribly well-funded in this state, even though it’s one of the three branches of government.”

Losing an investigator or a victim-witness coordinator would lengthen the time it takes cases to go to court. They help assistant district attorneys by tracking down witnesses and gathering information needed for a case.

“They deal daily with those victims,” Henderson said. “And they do 100 other things around here ... that are necessary to make the process move forward.”

Legislators have toyed with other cuts but then took them back after outcry from judges across the state, Turner said.
“None of it’s been approved so far,” he said. “Hopefully, none of it will be.”

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com