COMMON PLEAS COURTS Pa. clerks: Computer system was rushed

The state blames human nature, mostly, but clerks say the system isn't ready.
GREENSBURG, Pa. (AP) -- Court clerks in some of the first 20 counties in a new statewide computer say the record system was rushed into service before it was ready -- costing them time and money.
And while state court officials acknowledge glitches, they say much of the problem is human nature: getting clerical staffs using 67 different county systems on the same computerized page.
The new $38 million common pleas court system -- paid for by a $10 fee assessed on every criminal case in the state, ranging from traffic tickets to homicides -- won't be implemented in the other 47 counties for up to a year past the original January 2005 goal, said Art Heinz, spokesman for the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.
"The implementation schedule was far too aggressive. Not enough time was allotted for county staff to adjust to the new system," Heinz said.
The purpose
The computer system is supposed to make it easier for court staff and law enforcement agencies to track criminal records, the payment of fines and other data without having to do county-by-county checks, Heinz said.
Westmoreland County Clerk of Courts David Patterson, whose office was one of two pilot programs to go online in December, said his office is backed up. He blamed state officials who quickly added 18 western Pennsylvania counties to the system earlier this year, causing slowdowns and glitches.
"If you build a prototype, before you build 100 more ships, you take the one out and see if it floats," Patterson said. "They were in such a hurry to get it out, they kept bringing it into new counties and it snowballed."
Cumberland County Clerk of Courts Dennis Lebo's office went online two weeks before Patterson's.
"We told Westmoreland we didn't think they should go live," Lebo said. "We were the first county, and it was very obvious to us that it wasn't ready.
Lebo and Patterson said the system is particularly sluggish tracking payments criminal defendants make on court costs, fines and restitution.
"I used to have two people do my whole 'fines and costs' office," Lebo said. "I'm pretty much in that office all the time now, and I've just hired a new person in February who went full-time two weeks ago. We've increased our labor 200 percent -- at one time we were a month behind."
The new system is intended to give counties with lesser means the same level of sophistication as their larger neighbors, Heinz said.
Doing records by hand
Yet officials in rural Fayette County say they've reverted to doing some records by hand rather than wrestle with the new system.
Soon after Fayette went online Feb. 23, officials there noted problems with financial and criminal records checks and reverted to doing some work by hand.
"We went from a system through which our work was processed in 24 hours to being two weeks behind," said Chief Deputy Clerk of Court Sharon Thomas.
Patterson has been stung by criticism of his office, because Westmoreland County has paid more than $27,000 so far this year to lodge inmates in the county jail who would have been committed to state prisons sooner were it not for paperwork delays.
"I don't want to put it all back on the [new computer] system -- but I don't want to take the fall for it, either," Patterson said. "I'm a taxpayer, too. I don't want to keep these people down there in jail" when they should be in a state prison. It costs the county about $55 per inmate, per day.
Sharing the blame
But Heinz said he's not sure that all of the problems attributed to the system are caused by it.
Cumberland County has always used handwritten paperwork to transfer inmates to state prisons, and that county hasn't seen the same problems that Westmoreland County has, Lebo said.
"Obviously, you have areas like Cumberland that aren't experiencing the same problems," Heinz said. "I'm not saying [Patterson's claims] are inaccurate -- but I think it's more about 'We're used to doing it this way, and now we have to learn to do it this way.'"
XOn the Net: Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts: http://www.aopc.org