Legal News

City's Criminal Justice Leaders Push for Budget Action in Harrisburg

By Brian Harris

By Amaris Elliott-Engel
Of the Legal Staff

In an effort to ratchet up the sense of urgency in Harrisburg on a sales tax and pension recalculation bill that would let the city close a yawning budget gap, Mayor Michael A.  Nutter and the leaders of the city's criminal justice system held a press conference today asking the state Senate to pass the bill as soon as possible and without attaching amendments that could keep the bill in legislative limbo.

In details revealed for the first time during the press conference, District Attorney Lynne Abraham said her office not only canceled the class of entry-level district attorneys for this fiscal year but will not be hiring a class for the 2010-2011 year.

Ellen Greenlee, chief defender of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said her office is one of the vendors that contracts with the city that is not being paid after the city stopped all payments the Nutter administration deemed non-essential. The Defender Association has been able to pay its staff over the last two months only because the association borrowed money to pay its expenses, Greenlee said.

Common Pleas President Judge Pamela Pryor Dembe said that after the court paid for its leases on various buildings that there was only $10,000 left in that bank account.

Abraham said that hand wringing over worst-case scenarios can be avoided as long as the bill is passed quickly. The city's current fiscal plan hinges on getting new sales tax revenues and tinkering with pension payments to avoid shutting down large chunks of municipal governance.

Under a budget plan without the sales tax and pension bill passed into law, the First Judicial District's funding would be reduced from $99 million to $24.7 million in this fiscal year and zeroed out for the four years after that, according to Nutter's press office.

The District Attorney Office's funding would be reduced from $28.9 million to $7.2 million in this fiscal year and restored for the next four years. The Defender Association's funding would be reduced this fiscal year from $35.9 million to $9 million and would be restored for the next four years.

"If we don't have the money to fund this system, we will have to partially close it down," Nutter said.

When asked about the legality of closing down parts of the criminal justice system, Nutter said he didn't know if the city could legally close down parts of the court system. But as a practical matter, the mayor said, if there isn't money to pay staff, then a system can't be run without the staff.

Dembe said -- on the issue of the legality of closing down parts of the system -- that even if there are constitutional issues with such closures, "if there is no money, there is no money."

Philadelphia Bar Association Chancellor Sayde Ladov, who attended the press conference, said that severe cuts to the court system could dismantle all of the efficiencies established in the system like the civil trial division's day-forward/day-backward program and the local legal economy could be devastated by courthouse closures.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).