St. Joseph County Mandate

I have written any number of posts on the subject of judicial mandates for county governments to pay for court funding desired by trial court judges. Generally, I have been struck by the uneven playing field as between judges and other county department heads seeking county funds for their departments. Part of the disparity comes from the fact that judges aren’t, strictly speaking, county department heads — they are state officials; but they are supported by county employees, use county facilities, and in an administrative sense look very much like county department heads. Other department heads cannot just write up an order commanding the county council to appropriate money for them. In fairness, most trial court judges exhaust more traditional methods before attempting this. (Just brainstorming here before my coffee, but I wonder if it would make sense to give judges their own taxing authority to fund their mandates; making sure that the source of the mandate and tax are properly noted on the tax bill so they are spelled out pretty plainly come election time.)

In any event, the Indiana Supreme Court has issued an opinion in a mandate case coming out of St. Joseph County. Without any great recent study of the opinions, my sense has been that judges ruling on the reasonableness of another judge’s mandate has tended to make the cases look like the scales were tilted in favor of a mandate’s success. But, in this case, the Supreme Court pruned back Judge Nemeth’s mandate a bit. It is the first mandate decision issued by the state supreme court since the modification of Trial Rule 60.5 governing mandates.

The open:

Thousands of Hoosiers of every kind and station come to Indiana?s trial courts each day to vindicate their legal rights and seek protection for their nearest and dearest interests. The con-stitutions and laws of our land demand that trial courts and their judges have the resources they need to resolve these cases promptly and fairly.

Indiana law imposes on county government the obligation for funding the majority of court operations. County government also has the obligation for funding many other important services. These are challenging obligations in any circumstances and they are particularly difficult in the present.

Just to editorialize a bit more – I sometimes get the sense that judges issuing mandates believe their services are more important than those provided by other parts of the county. Maybe they are, but I haven’t seen much in the way of discussion about that proposition. It seems to be a starting assumption in these cases.

In this case, Judge Nemeth issued three mandates. Mandate 1 declared that the undeveloped eastern half of a piece of property adjacent to the local juvenile justice center was necessary for the effective administration of juvenile justice and prohibited the county from selling it to someone else – most notably Ivy Tech which was interested in potentially buying the property. Mandate 2 required the county commissioners and council to approve $300,000 in purchase orders relative to the renovation of the juvenile justice center. Mandate 3 orders $60,000 in raises for eight juvenile justice employees.

The review of mandate cases are a little different than normal review of a county government’s expenditure of funds. Typically a challenge to the county council’s appropriation of funds would simply look to whether the decision was rational. In other words, if they decide to appropriate or not appropriate money, that decision is given a lot of deference. However, when it’s a court challenging the decision not to appropriate funds and mandating funds be appropriated in a certain fashion, the review is “whether the funds ordered paid are reasonably necessary for the operation of the courts and any court-related functions and whether any specific fiscal or other go-vernmental interests are so severely and adversely affected by the payment as to require the order to be set aside.” So, a court is in a lot better starting position than other claimants for county money when it comes to judicial review of a county’s decision not to spend that money in a certain fashion.

The Supreme Court approved the mandate of funds related to Judge Nemeth’s claim that the day reporting program needed to be expanded in response to a previous budget cut that required elimination of a portion of the juvenile detention capacity. This was approved even without evidence of an actual expansion of day reporting participants because it was reasonable to conclude that closing detention facilities could lead to an increase in day reporting sentences and that the increase would materialize if day reporting had expanded capacity. Sort of an “If you build it, they will come” concept.

The Supreme Court also rejected the Commissioners argument that an automobile for the detention center wasn’t within a judge’s mandate authority because such an automobile wasn’t related to the operation of a court. The Supreme Court reasoned that a detention center automobile was “court-related.” “Because the court operates the juvenile detention facility at the Center, the care of those children, including their safe, reliable transportation for medical and dental services, is a court-related function for purposes of T.R. 60.5.” The Supreme Court used the same rationale to support the judicial mandate that the County spend its money on a new washing machine and new carpet for the detention center.

The Supreme Court rejected expenditures related to creating a new court room for a senior judge to use full time. (Currently, the senior judge uses a court room not in use by one of the regular judges.) It cited the judicial case load statistics for the proposition that the case load had been essentially level over the past several years. It rejected the expenditures for ergonomic chairs for the judges.

With one exception, the Supreme Court rejected a series of mandated salary increases for juvenile detention center staff. While the resulting salaries may well have been reasonable in a general sense, the Supreme Court – with one exception – determined that the judge did not carry his burden to show that similarly situated employees in nearby counties (for example) earned more or that the raises were necessary to retain qualified employees. (In a down economy, it’s probably tough to show that employees would actually leave for other jobs, particularly when you factor in benefits of public sector employment such as regular hours and health benefits.) The lone exception was the the Supreme Court approved a mandated raise for a bookkeeper making $27k per year in 2008.

With respect to the mandate that the county not dispose of unused land adjacent to the juvenile detention center, the special judge at the trial level dismissed that mandate concluding that, as the land was not being used presently but only represented a potential use for the judiciary in the future, it would be difficult to conclude that the mandate was necessary to assure that the court function at a reasonable rate and in a dutiful manner. The Supreme Court did not specifically address that conclusion but took Judge Nemeth at his word that, if allowed to present evidence, he could show that preventing the Commissioners from selling that county land was necessary for the operation of court or court-related functions. Therefore, the order of dismissal of that mandate was vacated and remanded for trial.

Finally, the Supreme Court approved an award of attorney’s fees for Judge Nemeth’s attorney. The fees seemed in-line for what I’d expect on a case of this nature (about $18k), but I did find it interesting that the Supreme Court approved attorney’s fees for work that preceded the mandate, leading up to its actual issuance.

The mandate procedure will ensure that courts are almost always the squeakiest wheel, getting greased when counties allocate their (ever more) limited funds. I don’t know if it’s the right answer, but I think the General Assembly should give at least some thought to making courts state-funded entities. The judge is already regarded as a state employee. I suspect we’d see legislation on mandates in short order if these judicial mandates were coming out of the State’s general fund rather than out of county funds.

My bias is admittedly in favor of local government. I just work with our county too much to be entirely objective here. And I don’t think judges are inclined to use this power frivolously or for matters that are unimportant. But, I do think that other county department heads are, by and large, equally judicious with their funding requests and also have functions that are important. The county fiscal body is charged with weighing these requests and functions against the limited resources of local tax dollars. Having one aspect of county government that can do an end run around the county fiscal body creates an imbalance.