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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Ind. Courts - Couldn't this appear a little misleading? How do the numbers add up?

The ILB has not posted an entry on the Court's Odyssy/JTAC project in some time. A longer entry is planned for the near future. But this WISH-TV story, dated Oct. 13th, deserves attention. A few quotes from the story, which is based in large part on this press release put out by the Supreme Court press office last week:

HAMILTON COUNTY, Ind. (WISH) - Faster and shared access to court documents, that's the goal of a program that is being installed across Indiana.

The system called Odyssey was launched in Hamilton County Tuesday that now makes 40 Indiana courts in 13 counties. It's a court case management system that started as a pilot in 10 counties and continues to expand.

ILB - That is 40 courts out of well over 400, and 13 counties out of 92. But here is the statement that requires attention:
Ollie Schierholz the Hamilton County Court Administrator commented that as the court administrator I am especially pleased that we have Odyssey because for the tax payers of Hamilton County this is subsequently going to result in an excess of $70,000 every year.

The program is being paid for by a court filing fee established by the General Assembly.

Or, to quote the above-cited press release:
Courts pay no installation costs, training costs, license fees, or annual maintenance costs for Odyssey. Those costs are paid by JTAC from the proceeds of a court filing fee dedicated to the project by the General Assembly.
A press release from Sept. 24th announced that Owen County was now using Odyssey. A quote:
It is part of the Court's effort to equip every Indiana court with a 21st-century case management system and connect courts with each other and state agencies. Courts pay no installation costs, training costs, license fees, or annual maintenance costs for Odyssey. Those costs are paid by JTAC from the proceeds of a court filing fee dedicated to the project by the General Assembly.
Here is the issue. These first few courts' costs are being paid out of the court filing fees accumulated from ALL the counties in the state, whether or not they have Odyssey. But there has to be a tipping point here, when the filing fees are not enough to fund even one more court.

Actual numbers and answers are hard to come by, but it is clear that the $7.00 "automated record keeping fee" now collected for all "civil, criminal, infraction, and ordinance violation actions" is already not enough to finance the project. As discussed at the end of this ILB entry from Feb. 21, 2009, requests by the Court to increase the fee were denied in the 2009 legislative session. The proposal would have upped the $7 fee to $10, starting July 1, 2009. Here is a graphic showing the automated record keeping fee and how it has increased over time:

Increases in Annual Automated Record Keeping Fee Through the Decade
2001 $2 annually
2002 $5 annually until 7-1-03, then $7 annually until 7-1-09, then $4 annually thereafter.
2004 $7 annually until 7-1-09, then $4 annually thereafter.
2007 $7 annually until 7-1-11, then $4 annually thereafter.
2009 $7 annually until 7-1-09, then $10 until 7-1-13, then $7 annually thereafter. [proposed]

See also this ILB entry from Nov 6, 2008 - "Making Sense of Court Fees."

The proposed increase from $7 to $10 failed to be adopted in the 2009 session.

From an August 2nd interview with Court of Appeals Judge Paul Mathias, a member of the Judicial Technology and Automation Committee, reported in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:

When do you think the Allen County court system will be connected?

Sometime in 2010. The issue here is that JTAC has limited resources to roll out these systems in counties, and as soon as we finish with our current rollout in Hamilton County, I think that JTAC will turn its attention and focus upon Allen County, which has a very significant court system in terms of size that is important to include in the statewide system.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette published an article on July 14th that raised a lot of eyebrows. Here is the ILB entry quoting from the story. At the end of the story I posed a number of questions, including:
JTAC picks up much of the cost of counties willing to sign on to the CMS system, so each county that signs on will add to the budgetary total. How much will operating the CMS system alone cost, when 92 counties are involved? How much will court fees need to be raised to cover this?
In an effort to come up with some answers, the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee put this language in the Senate version of the 2009 budget, in place of the requested increase in the automated record keeping fee. The language is not in the final adopted budget, but neither is the fee increase.

It does not seem unreasonable to ask, what are the overall numbers for the JTAC projects, and what funding will be required over time?

Here is a long list of earlier JTAC entries on the ILB.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 13, 2009 07:49 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts