County Dedicates a Courthouse Designed to Allay Children’s Fears : Legal system: Officials call the facility for dependency cases the best in the nation. Some people, however, criticize its cost and location.

To shield youngsters from felons and other undesirables in the criminal courts, Los Angeles County on Monday dedicated the nation’s first courthouse designed for child abuse and neglect cases.

Featuring fanciful statues of pastel-colored palm trees and overhead lights in the shape of clouds, the $59.6-million building in Monterey Park looks more like an annex of Disneyland than a courthouse.

The building is unlikely to solve all or even most of the problems facing the Dependency Court system, but even critics of its location and cost say it should make youngsters less intimidated about testifying.

Outside the 25-courtroom, 412-acre facility are ultra-modern playgrounds. In the waiting room are pool tables and video sections, playhouses and nap areas. Even the courtrooms are designed to be “child-sensitive.” Instead of 20-foot ceilings, wood-paneled walls and towering benches for judges, ceilings in the new building are low, walls are decorated in pastel colors and judges sit closer to a child’s eye level.

Many problems still exist in the Dependency Court system, according to a Los Angeles County Grand Jury report released this month. But with the opening of this, the newest building in the Los Angeles Superior Court system, Los Angeles has gone from having perhaps the worst Dependency Court facilities in the country to the best, said Deanne Tilton, executive director of the county’s Interagency Council on Child Abuse.

Previously, children and their families had to wait in crowded waiting rooms, often next to criminal defendants. They routinely saw criminals taken away in shackles and handcuffs, and they had to conduct interviews with lawyers and social workers in public. When the building opens for business in July, children and their families will have private interview rooms, a cheery cafeteria, a library and play areas stocked with toys and games.

“There is nothing like it anywhere in the country,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman. The building, formally known as the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court, was named after the supervisor because of his efforts on behalf of county youth over the past 17 years, including establishment of the Department of Children’s Services in 1984.

Years in the planning, the new court has been praised because it was designed to ease the trauma of neglected, abused and abandoned children who must visit court frequently to determine whether they should be removed from their homes and placed with relatives or in foster care.

In a typical abuse or neglect case, parents and children make six or seven trips to the court in the first year. Cases often go on for five years, said Charlene Saunders, Dependency Court administrator.

But the new Dependency Court building also has been criticized because of its price tag. The financially strapped county is covering the bulk of the cost of the $59.6-million building. The state has provided $600,000, and more than $1 million in cash and in-kind contributions has been raised from the private sector, including a $400,000 gift from the Mark Taper Foundation.

The location of the building also has raised concerns. Families and social workers in the Antelope Valley, on the other side of the county, have been especially critical. Instead of being allowed to go to a Dependency Court annex in Van Nuys, or to the downtown Criminal Courts Building, where most of the county’s dependency cases have been handled over the past 17 years, residents of the northwest corner of the county will have to travel as much as three hours by public transportation to the new site, which is east of downtown near the campus of Cal State Los Angeles.

For all of its advantages, the new building is unlikely to do much, if anything, to solve chronic problems facing the Dependency Court system.

A June 1 investigative report by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury concluded that the Dependency Court is viewed by many in the judicial system as the “bottom of the barrel.” The report found that:

* Most judges do not choose Dependency Court, but are assigned there. They rarely stay long enough to develop proficiency in juvenile dependency law, the dynamics of family relations or the skills needed to manage an overloaded calendar. As a result, most dependency courtrooms in the county are staffed by commissioners or referees. Few of them stay more than 18 months, and each hears 30 to 40 cases a day, which allows an average of only 16 minutes per case to hear arguments and render decisions.

* There are no uniform standards for attorneys who represent children and parents in the system, and a “significant number” of attorneys are submitting bills that appear “unreasonably large and possibly flagrantly abusive,” the grand jury said.

* The number of cases in the dependency system is enormous and growing--41,000 children, with 12,000 new children entering the system every year.

What is especially troubling, the grand jury report concluded, is that one of every three children who go through the Dependency Court for abuse and neglect eventually wind up in the Delinquency Court on a criminal matter.