State courthouse construction plans are suspended amid budget woes

Last November, the Judicial Council met -- in person -- in San Francisco and discussed spending more than $13 billion in the coming years on building courthouses and renovating old ones. The next month, doctors in Wuhan, China, began reporting the first cases of a serious, previously unknown respiratory illness.

These two seemingly unrelated events came together in this sentence on page 99 of Gov. Gavin Newsom's revised budget summary last week: "This action suspends $2 billion ($505 million General Fund) over the next five years as the courts reassess how they use their facilities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic."

This includes $43.6 million of General Fund support for assessment and construction of courthouse projects that were contained in the 2020-21 budget Newsom proposed in January. This money is just part of the carnage resulting from the economic shutdown put in place across the state and across the nation to stem the spread of the pandemic.

Among the items that could be delayed are large court projects in Alameda, Los Angeles and San Francisco counties.

But the news wasn't all bad. The revised budget contains $966.6 million to maintain several existing projects, including some long-delayed urban courthouse constructions.

Nearly half of this money, $459.8 million, is set aside for the construction of a 17-story, 543,290 square foot courthouse in downtown Sacramento. Other items include two appropriations totaling $250.5 million for a new courthouse in Modesto, $95.6 million for a pair of new courthouses in fast-growing Riverside County, and $160.7 million for a courthouse in Santa Rosa.

Aside from a small amount of new spending in Stanislaus County, these funds are a "re-appropriation" of money approved during past budget years, said Judicial Council Finance Director Zlatko Theodorovic.

"The Department of Finance has already included these expenditures into the long-term expenditure plan... not new money but technically the ability to spend money that was already appropriated a couple of years ago," Theodorovic said.

Details of this spending are contained in a letter the Department of Finance sent to the budget committee chairs in the Legislature on May 14 that details numerous construction projects that would no longer be funded under the revised budget. This is the same agency that released a report earlier this month stating that the $5.6 billion surplus in Newsom's draft budget release in January had turned into a $54.3 billion shortfall due to falling revenues and rising costs associated with the pandemic.

Newsom's plan spreads the pain across state government, including a $283.3 million cut from the courts budget for the coming fiscal year. It's possible that some of this money could be backfilled by federal spending, but recent news out of Washington, D.C. confirms the two major parties are very far apart in what might be included in a further federal stimulus bill.

The $2 billion would come out of the next batch of projects the Judicial Council discussed last year. But Theodorovic said "there is no official list" of approved projects yet beyond the ones approved in the current budget.

That November meeting also provided a kind of refresher on the long saga of courthouse construction funding going back years. Judicial Council Administrative Director Martin Hoshino gave a short presentation on the long-term reduction in revenue from fines and fees, traditionally one of the main sources of construction funding for the branch. This is on top of the $1.4 billion that was taken out of the branch's main court construction account to backfill the General Fund during the great recession.

Steven E. Jahr, a member of the branch's Court Facilities Advisory Committee, praised Gov. Jerry Brown for making court construction a priority in his 2018-19 budget, his last as governor. This got several of the current projects off the ground.

While a recession must feel like a particularly terrible coincidence for courts that have been waiting years for new facilities, there is a bright side to the timing, Theodorovic said. There could potentially be small changes to some of the construction to better serve the public and keep them safe, he said.

"We're a little unsure about what we'll see in a post-COVID environment," Theodorovic said. "What will it look like going forward with social distancing? What will courthouses look like?"