Regular Foreclosures On Hold In Florida

March 12th, 2008

The chief judge of Broward warned that there would be an alteration in the way justice was carried out in the courthouses in Florida due to an impact, which would be catastrophic in nature. Criminal cases would gain more importance than civil ones. Rulings on dependency cases and child-support disputes will be delayed and parents dependent on the case managers for these will be forced to wait for a longer period of time.

The employees of the courthouse administration will have to accept unpaid leave of 58 days in the county courts and 22 days in the circuit courts according to a proposal made by the legislature to cut the budgets of the state courts. The employees would not receive paychecks and thus their livelihoods would obviously be affected. However, according to the judges and the court administrators, the business held in courthouses would be clearly compromised. Employees like court interpreters, judicial assistants and case managers would all be forced somehow, into furloughs.

However, how the various courts would deal with the furloughs is still unclear, Victor Tobin, the Chief Judge of Broward predicted that it would certainly have a pretty disastrous effect on the Broward courts. According to him, the business carried out in the courts would all come to a screeching halt. Cases like evictions, foreclosures, hearings of Traffic tickets would all come to a standstill and the jails would be oversaturated. Most of the employees facing a furlough would probably not return. Chief Circuit Judge Roby feels that the court system is very important and he also says that money cuts were of serious concern. He goes on to say that if the courts could not be run properly due to funding crisis, then all the people would suffer.

The overall budgets have increased over the years due to the growing population. The proposal for furloughs was thought to be better than layoffs, because this way the employees would at least be able to hold on to their health insurance. However, legislators feel that such drastic measures could have been avoided as the budget cuts for the courts had been there for quite some months. Howard Finkelstein says that they are dealing with the crisis by avoiding new appointments as the office is as it is suffering from funding crisis and on top of that, the staff is overburdened with work. As a result, the cases coming in cannot be prosecuted.