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Funds found for study on fusing courts
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
YOUNGSTOWN
A feasibility study on consolidation of Mahoning County’s lower courts has been funded by a $50,000 grant from the State Justice Institute, the county bar association has announced.
Based in Alexandria, Va., SJI was established in 1984 by federal law to award grants to improve the quality of justice in state courts.
The National Center for State Courts, which will perform the study, will donate $15,000 worth of its staff time to the study, said Atty. Scott R. Cochran, bar association president.
NCSC is a Williamsburg, Va.-based independent, nonprofit court-improvement organization.
The bar association, which applied for the grant, will seek to raise $5,000 in required local matching money for the study from the county and from cities with municipal courts, Cochran said.
“It’s truly an independent study ... We want them to give us an independent study to see what the best ideas are,” Cochran said of the National Center, which was recommended to the association by the Ohio Supreme Court.
“They do this stuff for a living, and we’ve looked, and we don’t think there’s anyone more qualified to do the study than them,” Cochran said.
The study will examine potential cost savings and efficiency improvements from consolidating the county and municipal courts and how best to achieve consolidation if it’s deemed feasible and desirable.
Mahoning County’s lower courts consist of county courts in Boardman, Canfield, Austinown and Sebring and municipal courts in Youngstown, Campbell and Struthers.
Youngstown Municipal Court has three full-time judges. Every other location has a single part-time judge.
Each of these courts has trial jurisdiction over traffic and misdemeanor criminal cases, landlord-tenant matters and small-claims civil lawsuits.
The letter of award from SJI says the study grant begins this month and runs through Nov. 1. The letter recommends local political officeholders, including area state legislators, be added to a study advisory committee of justice agency and court representatives.
In its grant application, the bar association wrote that legislation would be necessary to permit consolidation to occur and that court reorganization would be a multiyear effort.
“Sitting judges would be grandfathered, probably until the end of their terms,” the association wrote, adding that up to 70 court employees would be affected by consolidation.
“This is a logistically, politically and legally difficult undertaking,” the association said in its grant application.
“In the economic crisis that our governments seem to be in right now, if the study produces results that may lead to cost savings to the Mahoning County taxpayers, now might be the time for us to give serious consideration to it,” Cochran said.