Our Courts - Contra Costa County Bar Association

Looking Forward:
A Few Words from the
Incoming Presiding Judge
This will be a challenging year. As we discussed during the public meetings
held in August, the latest budget cuts require us to make some very
significant changes in how we organize the court.
As a result, we are “re-engineering” our operations to find savings, promote
efficiencies and maximize the use of our increasingly scarce resources.
“Because we have always done it that way” has become an inadequate answer.
We are drilling down and asking, “Why have we done it that
way Can we improve on that”
We are cutting more than seven million dollars
from our budget. (That is in addition to the
Hon. Barry Goode
seven and a half million dollars we cut
Assistant Presiding Judge
over the last three years.) So, we
have had to make some very painful decisions.
We have to close a civil department and change one
family department to essentially a settlement judge
position.
“Because we have always done it that way”
has become an inadequate answer. We are
drilling down and asking, “Why have we
done it that way Can we improve on that”
We also must do what we can to consolidate
case types. So, with great regret, we are moving
juvenile cases out of Pittsburg and Richmond,
and family cases out of Pittsburg. We
are consolidating our criminal cases in three
locations rather than four.
Perhaps our greatest loss is this: we must close
the courtrooms of all but three of our commissioners.
These are bench officers who have served
our county long and well. We respect their work
and deeply wish there could have been a different
way of absorbing seven million dollars in budget
cuts.
Three commissioners remain. Two will hear traffic cases
and one will hear the child support calendar. The two
traffic commissioners will “ride circuit,” allowing us to hear
traffic cases in Pittsburg, Walnut Creek and Richmond. The
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NovemBER 2012