Florida Court System Shutdown Avoided
The Orlando Sentinel reports that Courts get funding reprieve. Won’t be shuttered.
Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles T. Canady and Gov. Rick Scott’s Office reached a breakthrough agreement this morning, meaning courts statewide won’t have to shut down four days next week and for two weeks in May.
The agreement authorizes a loan that will fund circuit and county courts operations, meaning hundreds of employees statewide will not be forced out of work temporarily.
Just yesterday, it was feared that the budget shortfall — estimated at about $50 million — would mean exactly that plus three weeks of trial and court delays.
Here is what you need to know to understand this issue:
The affected courts are funded by the filing fees, and when the foreclosure cases were discovered to be less than fully honest and aboveboard, the filing fee income dried up. The court has set up a special system to try foreclosures, and now it is stuck paying for a system that was no longer needed, and not generating any revenue.
The system once had a “rainy day fund”, but the legislature needed money to cover the deficit without raising taxes a while back. The court thought the fund was loaned to the legislature, but the legislature considered it a gift, and now is “loaning” money to the courts.
Florida has no stable form of funding for anything in government, and the legislature is draining every fund to cover the general revenue gap and not looking at taxes, except to cut them.
