Since the summer, I have attended San Bernardino Superior Court Presiding Judge Michael Sachs giving a state-of-the-court three times.
I’m mostly writing today about Friday’s SOTC lunch address, but I have notes from the addresses at the summer Joseph B. Campbell Inn of Court and the November Bench-Bar Symposium on Probate Practice, so this will be somewhat of a composite recap.
The short version is that San Bernardino Superior Court is shy some judges, courtrooms and funding, but is accomplishing important things for our large county.
“It’s a tribute to you folks that we’ve done as well as we’ve done in San Bernardino County,” said Sachs, who will be the presiding judge until midnight Dec. 31.
Shortfalls
The pandemic shut down the courts just a few months into Sachs’ tenure as presiding judge, and in July of 2020 the county courts faced a budget cut of $168 million.
San Bernardino County has the fifth largest court system in California, which comprises the largest court system in the nation. S.B. Co.’s court is budgeted to 75% of its needs. Average for a county is about 82%, he said.
A workload study by the Judicial Council of California determines funding – how many employees and how many judges each county should have. The determination is San Bernardino County should have 1,300 employees; during COVID it had 900.
Right now the county has 77 judges, with seven openings (soon there will be 11 or 12.) There are also a couple handfuls of commissioners. “There are 93 bodies doing the work of bench officers. The study shows we need 50 more,” Sachs said. But if we got 50 more, we wouldn’t have places to put them all, because we are also in need of courtrooms.
“With growth you have a lot of crime,” Sach said. “We moved family law out of Victorville to make room for criminal cases. Family law moved to Barstow.”
(He said it went like this:
High Desert folks said, “We don’t really want to go to Barstow.”
You can go to Barstow or San Bernardino. You pick.
“Barstow is fine.”)
Accomplishments
The courts are building out a jury room in Victorville. “But we still don’t have enough room for 50 more judges.” If a new courthouse was approved today and building started tomorrow, it would take 15 to 20 years to build that new courthouse, he said. There is money for the first step in the process – a feasibility study.
Meanwhile, Sachs has presided over the instigation of great innovation.
“We tend to lead the other courts in Southern California, even though we’re relatively small,” (compare our 77 judges and fewer than 20 commissioners to Los Angeles County’s 500,) Sachs said.
But he was not calling the county small. I had always heard and repeated that San Bernardino County was the largest county in the nation. Wikipedia says it is too, listing its area as 20,105.32 square miles. It lists Los Angeles as the largest county by population, with San Bernardino ranking 14th on that list, behind Riverside at 10th.
Sachs said the biggest county was in Alaska. They have boroughs, and those are much bigger than counties, but the point is, he said of S.B. Co., “It’s a four-hour drive to Needles. It’s a large county.”
This is why remote access is so important, and why the county’s courts count being among the first to offer a Direct Access Self Help (DASH) program in the accomplishments list, along with the establishment of remote policies and procedures, and the complete installation of Odyssey, a case-management system.
“This two years has been crazy,” Sachs said. In addition to the pandemic, (he said only three to six cases of COVID originated in the courthouse), civil unrest in the spring and summer affected every court. Sachs immediately established social-awareness programs.
“It was important for our court to send a message that discrimination was not OK in San Bernardino,” he said. “We’re open, we’re progressive, and we welcome everyone.”
He founded the first elimination-of-bias committee in Southern California – chaired by Judge John M. Pacheco and Judge Khymberli S. Apaloo – and established town-hall programming.
Judge Sachs will leave his post with changes in place that reflect thoughtfulness and sensitivity for the people who use our county courts. He rose to multiple challenges, and leaves big shoes to fill.
