Disorder in the Court

For 23 years, judges have been battling for a new courthouse in South County, where courts are so crowded that a conference room is used for hearings and clerks work in stairwells.

Municipal Judge Pamela L. Isles in Laguna Niguel and others have waged an intense lobbying campaign from cramped chambers with soiled carpets and leaky roofs, peppering county officials with letters and phone calls.

The pleas may have paid off Thursday, when county supervisors voted to make funding for a new South County courthouse the county’s top priority for its five- to 10-year strategic plan.

The vote represented the first time the supervisors have committed to a long-term financial plan.

“We have to face reality, and reality is that improvements in South County are needed today,” said Supervisor Tom Wilson, whose district includes the courthouse.

Supervisors asked county finance officials to return with a plan for funding the courthouse, as well as architectural designs for a second phase of expansion at the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange. Chief Executive Officer Jan Mittermeier warned that funding of both projects will cost the county $60 million more than it has.

Board Chairman Jim Silva said he agreed to make the South County courthouse a priority as long as it is paired with new maximum-security beds at Theo Lacy. Both are possible if the projects are scaled down, he said. If given a choice, he said his priority was the jail.

“We need to see if there will be enough revenue to meet the demands,” Silva said. “This is just a first vote. We obviously can’t spend more money than we have.”

Still, Isles was cautiously victorious Thursday. She said she’s willing to go along with a two-phase construction of the new courthouse, with 11 courtrooms and a district attorney’s office to be built first. The remaining eight courtrooms could be phased in later, she said.

“It could be structured so a top floor could be added later,” Isles said after the vote. “I just don’t want to go through a redesign because that would take another two years. We need to get moving now.”

The new courthouse will cost $54 million. The land, in the Ladera planned community owned by Koll Co., would cost another $8 million, but could be offset by selling the current courthouse property on Crown Valley Parkway in Laguna Niguel. Supervisors last year set aside $5 million for courthouse design.

Architectural design for expanding the Theo Lacy Branch Jail would add another $27 million. It now will be up to Mittermeier and Chief Financial Officer Gary Burton to find a way to pay for both a new courthouse and the jail plans, and to determine whether the county has enough money to operate both facilities.

A new South County courthouse actually was in a third tier of priorities given to supervisors Thursday. County officials had been prodded in recent weeks by Municipal Court judges, who sent a “notice of specific deficiency” to supervisors invoking a state law that makes counties responsible for paying for some court facilities.

By itself, the letter carried no legal weight but was a step judges are required to take before they can sue the county demanding more space.

A similar notice sent to supervisors last year for funding for Superior Courts countywide sparked a bitter legal battle between the county and Superior Court judges. That lawsuit was settled last month when the county agreed to allocate $2.5 million in new court funds. But the settlement did not include funding for the South County courthouse.

There is little argument that new court space in South County is needed. When the Laguna Niguel courthouse was built in 1968, there were only about 100,000 residents in the area it served and relatively little crime. Today 559,200 people live in the eight cities and unincorporated areas of South County. Felony cases handled by the courthouse have increased from 447 in 1986 to 1,385 in 1997.

Ten years ago, traffic, civil and small claims courts were moved into rented space in a Laguna Hills office building, nine miles away. Building a new courthouse will save about $500,000 a year in lease payments, Isles said.

Some South County residents oppose the courthouse, fearing it will bring traffic and crime to their neighborhoods.

Mittermeier has recommended against it in the past, saying the county does not have the money to finance new construction as it recovers from bankruptcy.

For years, judges and court administrators at the courthouse have made do. They moved district attorneys, public defenders and parole officers into trailers in the parking lot. They turned the judges’ law library into offices for secretaries. A closet became an employee lounge, a juror’s assembly room became a courtroom and a jury room became chambers for two more judges.

Clerks’ desks and file cabinets crowd stairwells and hallways, in violation of county fire codes. An employee lounge has been cut in half to make room for office space.

“There’s no room at the inn,” Iles said.

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Court Crunch

South Orange County Municipal Court dockets have grown progressively more crowded, with the number of cases increasing 54% between 1986 and 1997. Most of the increase has occurred in four categories of cases:

Case category: Increase

Non-traffic infractions*: 244%

Felonies: 210%

Traffic infractions: 79%

Civil: 56%

* Minor criminal cases such as dog leash-law violations

Among the five judicial regions, the ratio of population to each judge is by far the highest in South County:

Population

Region: per judge

Central: 38,542

Harbor: 37,738

North: 58,404

South: 139,800

West: 59,645

Countywide: 56,584

Source: South Orange County Municipal Court; Researched by ESTHER SCHRADER/Los Angeles Times