Verdict Is in: Courtrooms Full : Overcrowding: The county Courthouse is flooded with cases. A lunchroom and college classrooms are being used for the spillover.

Judges, clerks and administrators agree: The Ventura County Courthouse is bursting at the seams.

Starting today, for the first time since the county Hall of Justice was built in 1978, a judge will be forced to hear a trial outside of the Courthouse--in a Ventura College of Law classroom.

It is an extraordinary measure forced on the courts by an increasingly routine problem. Nearly every day, all 29 courtrooms are full.

“This Courthouse was designed to serve the county to the year 2000, although it didn’t make it,” said Judge Ed Osborne, presiding judge of county Superior Court. “We’re bursting at the seams for space. We simply don’t have the space.”

Now, court is held regularly in conference rooms, lunchrooms, jury rooms and the law library.

The Municipal and Superior courts’ records office is so overloaded that microfilming is 16 years behind schedule. Most of the 26.5 million pages of unfilmed court papers are being stored at Camarillo Airport because there is not room enough in the records office.

And the court clerk’s staff soon will be squeezed out of their big old-fashioned wooden desks to save space. Some will move into cramped but space-efficient modern cubicles, and others into courtrooms.

“We constantly are struggling with space problems here,” said Sheila Gonzalez, executive officer and clerk of the Superior and Municipal courts. “The resources haven’t been available to keep up with the growing pains.”

The increasing burden of criminal and civil cases is to blame.

Ventura County’s population has increased from 529,174 to about 669,000 since 1980. The amount of civil and criminal litigation has grown, too.

The Municipal Court handled 201,067 cases last year, up from 165,000 10 years ago.

And last year, the Superior Court handled 24,188 active cases, up from only 14,763 cases filed in 1980.

Now the courts employ an average of three retired judges per week, paying them each $300 a day to hear cases that sitting judges do not have time for.

As manager of court services for case and calender management, Alice Lopez spends her mornings juggling courtrooms and judges. “On Mondays we are filled to the gills with settlement conferences being heard by retired judges,” Lopez said recently. “In Municipal Court, we’ve tried to juggle and combine schedules so if a judge is on vacation or attending a seminar or training we can use his courtroom.”

Judge Robert L. Shaw, who retired from the Superior Court in 1986, returns to the bench on a regular basis to help the Superior Court with its backlogged caseload. Now 70, Shaw routinely gets what Alice Lopez calls “the short end of the stick”--assignment to temporary courtrooms.

“The biggest problem I have is carrying a robe around from place to place and putting a robe on in front of the whole gathering,” Shaw said recently. “It feels awkward to stand up in front of 15 to 20 people to change clothes.”

Shaw said he began his day last Monday in the judges’ lunch room, holding a juvenile sentencing hearing.

Then he walked down the hall to a judges’ conference room, “because it’s a larger room,” to handle the day’s master calendar work. The agenda: to rule on three appeals of Small Claims Court judgments, review two juvenile civil cases and try one lawsuit filed by a large water company accusing a smaller water company of stealing its water.

“Since I don’t know from day to day where I’ll be, all parties report in the morning to Department 22 and Alice Lopez looks all over the place to find something,” Shaw said. “If it’s a courtroom, it’s a courtroom. If it’s a conference room, it’s a conference room. If it’s a lunch room, it’s a lunch room.”

But on Monday, Shaw will be presiding over a civil trial at the Ventura College of Law in one of four classrooms which court administrators rent for $75 per day.

Everything and everyone needed for the trial, which is expected to last 10 to 15 days, must be shuttled from the Courthouse to the college--the judge, the jurors, law clerks, records and evidence, Shaw said.

Holding court outside a courtroom “is simply not the best way to do things,” said Judge Lee E. Cooper Jr., presiding judge of the Municipal Court.

“In terms of practicing justice, it doesn’t matter where I try a case,” Cooper said. But courts “must be operated with some degree of solemnity and dignity. When people go to court it ought to be a fairly important event in their life.”

In the Municipal Court’s satellite branch in Simi Valley, people are barely in court long enough for the experience to make an impression, said Commissioner John Paventi.

“The worst day I’ve ever had was two Wednesdays ago,” he said with a groan. “I had 169 arraignments and seven court trials in the morning. . . . That’s in about two hours and 40 minutes. I was able to dispose of them, but you have to get quite concerned that people understand what’s happening to them when you’re only speaking to them for 20 seconds.”

Paventi said that when he moved into the county 17 years ago to practice law, the Simi circuit court judge had only two hours work per week.

Now 1,800 to 2,000 cases are filed each month, and the court operates three days a week, often in standing-room-only conditions, Paventi said.

In November, the Simi court will be moved to a new building in Simi Valley, with two courtrooms each for Municipal and Superior courts, and one for juvenile cases. The calendar may expand to four or five days a week, Paventi said.

The Ventura Courthouse staff, meanwhile, now numbers about 270, and is being squeezed from every direction.

Nineteen Municipal Court clerks are giving up their desks in the second-floor clerk’s office and moving to permanent desks in the courtrooms where they already spend most of their time.

“We’ve got so many people,” said Florence Prushan, assistant executive officer of both courts. “Our records people used to have desks. We’ve had to move them out. We’ve had to move workstations into outer office areas because we have files in those rooms.”

“Everybody is just bulging at the seams,” Prushan said. “When we opened we had room for everybody in this building and now it’s just a mad scramble for space all over the place.”

Meanwhile, Gonzalez, Cooper, Osborne and other county court and government officials are weighing the options, trying to decide whether to build more courtrooms, or to keep using any extra room they can find to handle the increasing caseload.

“The growth is constant,” said Gonzalez. “There’s so much more litigation than everybody imagined years and years ago,” when the Courthouse was designed. “And everybody’s filing suits. It’s still a growing county.”