Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Long-Awaited Juvenile Dependency Court to Open in Lancaster

Delivering good and bad news, county officials announced Wednesday that a long-awaited juvenile dependency court will open Tuesday in Lancaster, but said local families with existing cases will continue to have to travel to the main court in distant Monterey Park.

Starting Tuesday, new dependency court cases arising from the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys--cases that decide whether abused and neglected children should be taken from their parents--will be assigned to the new Lancaster court, meaning a much shorter commute for those families.

The new courtroom in the county’s Lancaster courthouse will be the only satellite dependency court in the county. Its approval was part of county officials’ increased recognition of the child abuse problem in the Antelope Valley after a series of Times’ articles on the subject.

However, because the Lancaster court will only handle dependency cases about half the time, with the other time spent on juvenile criminal matters, court officials said they could not suddenly transfer the more than 1,000 pending north county dependency cases to its single judge.

Thus, north county families with existing dependency court cases will continue--at least for now--to battle the same long and difficult commutes of up to 80 miles each way that they have faced for the past year to the county’s new $60-million children’s court complex in Monterey Park.

In the past, north county families typically had their dependency court hearings held in courtrooms in Van Nuys. But the county’s dependency courts in Van Nuys and downtown Los Angeles were closed and relocated to the Monterey Park complex when it opened last July.

John Walker, the county’s manager of juvenile court services, said county officials plan to review the new Lancaster dependency court and its policies after about three months. The policy on keeping existing north county cases in Monterey Park could be re-evaluated at that time, Walker said.

Aides to county Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who pushed for the creation of the Lancaster dependency court, said he intends to lobby for all north county dependency cases to be assigned there. The change would “reduce the trauma for abused and neglected children,” Antonovich said.

The new dependency court, dubbed Department 426, will be run by Superior Court Referee Eugene Siegel, who will continue to handle juvenile delinquency matters in Lancaster. The city of Lancaster, in a trade-off with the county, paid for the necessary remodeling and expansion of Siegel’s courtroom.