Martin DeAgostino, writing for the South Bend Tribune, has an article entitledSouthBendTribune.com: Judge finds little merit to counties’ lawsuit
The lawsuit in question is a suit by Marion, Clark, and St. Joseph counties alleging that the State, and not the counties, is responsible for paying for the cost of juvenile detention. Currently, juveniles are sent to state run juvenile detention centers (I guess I don’t know if there is more than one). The State then bills the county that sent the juvenile for the cost of detaining the juvenile. These costs can be pretty significant.
Last session, the General Assembly passed a law requiring the money to be repaid or the State would withhold property tax replacement payments due to the counties. (These were the the payments due to minimize some of the more severe consequences of the State’s restructuring of the state’s property taxes.) For Marion County, the withholding would cost $8.5 million for the remainder of 2005 and $16.7 million next year.
The county theory is based on Article 2, Section 9 of the Indiana Constitution which states, “Section 2. The General Assembly shall provide institutions for the correction and reformation of juvenile offenders.” It is also based on the argument that the judges who order the juvenile detentions are state officials. So, you have a state official ordering a juvenile into an institution that the Constitution commands the State to provide. And yet the State still bills the County. Seems to me the counties have a legitimate gripe here.
The trial court judge, Shelby Superior Judge Russell Sanders said “none of the plaintiffs’ claims has a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits as a matter of law.” Sanders found fault with those and other claims, primarily because the counties did not raise the issues in a timely manner. Counties have paid the bills for decades without challenge, he said, thus undermining their claims of improper billing. The article doesn’t say one way or the other, but I wonder if the judge addressed the fact that the General Assembly’s new withholding law changes the equation quite a bit and may justify a suit now that wasn’t brought in previous decades.
The counties’ attorney said he had yet to decide their next step. One possibility would be an appeal of the ruling denying the preliminary injunction. I’d say that’s the best bet. First, I don’t think a trial court is in a position to resolve this matter one way or the other. Much as I respect trial court judges, on this sort of issue, I’d say that stage of the game is a preliminary hurdle. Nobody is going to be satisfied with the trial court’s decision, and ultimately the facts aren’t in dispute. It’s a question of law that needs to be resolved and the appellate courts will consider those issues de novo. So, fast-tracking it to the Supreme Court as quickly as possible would seem to make the most sense.
I suppose I’m letting my local government bias show a little bit here. But the tendency of the politicians in Indianapolis to push as much unpleasantness as possible onto county governments gets tiresome.
Leave a Reply