Letter submitted by William Boardman, Windsor County Assistant Judge
To the Editor:
Recent reporting on the recommendations of the Commission on Judicial Operations takes too many of the commission’s unsupported assumptions at face value, leaving the shortcomings of the commission’s work largely unexamined.
Testifying without contradiction at the final hearing, Caledonia County Probate Judge Tobias Balivet pointed out that an honest study would have started with hard data, but the commission’s final report fails to develop a reality-based argument.
The final report provides no comprehensive overview of the Vermont court system. The commission’s final report provides no budget overview for this year or recent years. The commission’s final report does not even offer a clear picture of the geographical distribution of court facilities and personnel around the state, when geography is one of the fundamentally challenging realities for the judiciary.
These and other omissions make it impossible to come to an independent assessment of the commission’s conclusions, because the report comprises mostly a self-serving reiteration of the Supreme Court’s institutional agenda going back 70-plus years -- to the similar conclusions of the “Report of the Special Commission to Study the Judicial System of Vermont,” in February 1937.
“A sound process would have yielded credible results,” Judge Balivet told the commission, adding, “you haven’t honored your mandate.”
At the same hearing, Washington County Probate Judge George Belcher testified that the commission had misused the limited data it had by drawing conclusions from an invalid comparison.
It’s like comparing frozen food to cornfields when the commission uses one urban, fulltime probate court in Chittenden as the standard for thirteen other, part-time, rural probates courts in the rest of Vermont. Judge Belcher called the commission’s analysis “simplistic, hopeful, and wrong.”
The commission proposes to eliminate all 13 rural probates courts, replacing them with four “regional” probate courts. Somehow – the commission doesn’t say how – the efficiencies of an urban court’s population density can be duplicated in rural courts with much larger districts and more dispersed population. That’s a numbers-on-the-page folly unhinged from the way Vermonters live outside of Burlington.
Those who say the court system has never been looked at so closely are propagating a myth. The commission has produced a level of detail and persuasiveness that should be embarrassing – especially when compared to the “Judicial Operations Management Study” produced by former Sen. Edgar May and his team in 1992. The May report has a rigor and intellectual honesty that the current commission achieves only occasionally.
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