On June 27, Governor Jerry Brown signed the state’s 2016-2017 budget, which plans for $122.5 billion in General Fund spending. In addition to the budget’s many funding requirements and obligations set by the state constitution and voter-approved measures, the state’s judicial branch continues to receive incremental increases to its once severely slashed budget.
Among those most impacted by recession-era budget reductions were the trial courts, which saw courthouse and courtroom closures throughout the state. California courts suffered some of the deepest budget reductions and limped along for several budget cycles until most recently when surpluses in 2014 allowed for gradual increases in funding levels.
Once again for the 2016-2017 cycle, the budget has allocated additional funding that has, for the first time, taken the judiciary’s budget past its pre-recession amount of $3.7 billion. With the budget’s bump in 2015-2016 to $3.47 billion (from $3.29 billion in 2014-2015), the 20162017 budget has now reached a total funding amount of $3.8 billion. Of the total, $2.8 billion is allocated to support trial court operations.
Some of the line items specific to trial court funding include:
- An increase of $20 million for discretionary trial court operations.
- A total of $75 million to backfill an expected continued reduction of fines and penalty revenues expected. This is an increase of $8.8 million over 2015-2016.
- The Court Innovations Grant Program – a one-time $30 million grant that promotes improvement, efficiencies, and access to justice in the courts.
- An injection of $7 million to the Judicial Council’s current budget of $94.5 million for its court interpreter services to help improve language access for court users with limited English proficiency.