THIS SITE IS BEING PHASED OUT. NO FURTHER REGISTRATIONS WILL BE ALLOWED. ALL CONTENT IS BEING MOVED TO A NEW SITE.

All new items and comments to items on the CMS site (that's this site) will be cross-posted to the 33rdCourt@yahoogroups.com email list. You won't get the whole item, just the title and the teaser and it will update every (for now) 3 hours. Why do this? To get the legal community more involved interactively. Call it a "cyber bench-bar conference" if you will. Some people on the email list will not be given full membership in the CMS site. It will be restricted to attorneys and officials with a real need to know. It is my hope that those who have not signed onto the CMS site may see something for which they'd like to join into the discussion and then will jump on in.

The frustrations from this year's budget process with the counties came full circle today. I got the final numbers from all four counties on what they did with my budget request regarding employee pay raises.

The budget process is burdensome for all district judges but is exacerbated by having to deal with four counties. I can make 16 trips on budgets during the annual budget cycle: (1) present the budget request, (2) go back again and re-explain, plead, fuss, etc, (3) meet with each county judge and the juvenile probation chief for the juvenile board hearings to adopt the budget, and (4) present that budget to the county commissioners. Times 4 counties = 16 trips. And if there are any problems on the juvenile budget -- add 4 more trips.

In a joint meeting today of all four of the county juvenile boards we made a decision to hire a new chief. Acting as Chair of the juvenile boards and the process of hiring the chief is one of those nonjudicial duties that, while very important, detracts greatly from the primary constitutional duties of the Court. After days of interviews and now an entire afternoon of the final round it's at least finally over and with a good selection made but some excellent candidates to be disappointed.