THE WAITING AREA outside the domestic department window and clerk’s office of Strafford County Superior Court "looks like Shaw’s deli" at 8:30 a.m., according to Julie W. Howard, the court’s clerk. Throngs of people wait in line to conduct their business with the court, each feeling that his or her matter is more pressing than the next person’s.

"It’s like triage all the time: An emergency situation presents itself and you have to drop (a less pressing matter) to deal with it," said Howard.

Strafford County Superior Court currently has about one and a half fewer employees to deal with its many constituents and their pressing needs, a situation Howard and her staff have had to get used to for the past five years or so. Like many of the state’s courts, years of reduced funding for the judicial branch has translated into Strafford Superior not being sufficiently staffed to adequately meet the needs of its customers.

The courts have struggled to keep up with a gradually increasing workload, but years of operating short-staffed is beginning to take its toll on those efforts. A backlog of cases to be processed is growing and delays in processing cases are lengthening, as is the time to hearing. Limited staff resources must first be applied to addressing the time-sensitive cases coming into the courts on a daily basis, meaning the backlog grows.

The state’s court clerks carry much of the burden of trying to meet constituent needs with limited staff resources. It is the clerks’ responsibility to develop creative approaches to court management in order to make the most of those limited resources.

The Legislature this year appropriated $106 million of the $120.2 million requested by the judicial branch for the biennium. The $14 million difference is the result of a cut of $9.4 million in the overall appropriation, plus cuts of $3 million from the operating budget that had been marked for computer technology and a $1.7 million cut in the court security line item.

Because 75 percent of the judicial branch budget goes to salaries and benefits, that line item is expected to be the hardest hit. The majority of the budget – 50 percent – goes to non-judicial staff salaries and benefits. This includes the clerks and other support staff members, many of whom court officials say have been underpaid and overworked for years.

With this latest round of budget cuts, the staffing picture doesn’t look to get any brighter. According to Don Goodnow, executive director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, there were 32 unfilled non-judicial positions in the courts as of early October. Reduced funding will require these positions to be kept vacant for longer periods to save money. Forty-nine new positions were requested in court support staff this budget cycle; only nine have been filled so far.

In a letter released after the announcement that the Superior Court would suspend trials in five of the next 15 months to cut costs, Superior Court Chief Justice Walter L. Murphy cited case numbers for NH courts: The Superior Court disposed of 51,000 cases in 2000 and the district courts disposed of 175,000 last year. Keeping up with the volume of cases has always been the goal of the court system, but to do so without adequate staff has become an increasingly more difficult challenge.

Howard said that, ideally, filling three positions at Strafford Superior would meet the court’s current needs, but the money just isn’t there. She is still waiting for the one and a half vacant positions on her staff to be filled. Similarly, Hillsborough County Superior Court-South Clerk Marshall A. Buttrick recently lost one staffer, leaving a position open that will remain vacant indefinitely. In addition, Buttrick said, Hillsborough South could use another two employees to be adequately staffed. Manchester District Court Clerk Paula J. Hurley said she is down by one clerical employee, and actually needs two and a half staffers to be at full capacity. "We are now down-staffed with no hope of coming back any time soon," she said.

Being short-staffed has forced court clerks to move employees from their normal duties to departments with more pressing needs. Howard and Buttrick have both moved staffers from the equity/civil department to help process criminal and domestic cases, which are deemed the most time-sensitive. At Manchester District Court, Hurley has been forced to move someone out of the criminal division to the landlord/tenant clerk’s offices because landlord/tenant matters must be heard within two weeks.

The ill effect of such shifts is that it inevitably leaves a hole somewhere, which can then lead to a backlog in that understaffed department. By moving someone out of the equity/ civil department, for example, Howard and Buttrick run the risk of cases backing up in that department. "It’s a shell game, it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, all those clichés," said Howard.

Hurley had to choose between meeting the needs in the criminal division – in which cases must be processed quickly because of a constitutional right to speedy trial – and the even more pressing needs of the landlord/tenant department.

"At the district court level, this is a real problem because a large percent of the work we do is very time sensitive," said Hurley. "When you’re short-staffed you spend a good deal of time trying to apply limited staff to the cases that are most critical, in our case to those with the greatest potential risk to public safety and health: domestic violence, criminal domestic violence, juvenile matters and landlord/tenant cases," she said.

As a result of these backlogs, attorneys and litigants are now seeing delays in orders being issued and hearings being scheduled farther out. At Strafford Superior, for example, it used to take less than a week to get the initial service paperwork processed for a divorce; that paperwork takes about a month now, Howard said. Also in that court’s domestic department, as of October 16 there were 184 divorce, custody and visitation court orders waiting to go out, two of which were dated the end of July – and that doesn’t include the numbers of child support orders also waiting to be processed. Hearings are also being delayed. Buttrick said that in Hillsborough-South’s domestic department, final divorce decrees or temporary orders that used to take about two weeks to get out are now taking about 30 days to process. "We are not staffed at the level we need to be. The effect is a delay in processing cases," he said.

Such delays have ramifications. Hurley said that a delay in processing a DWI case, for example, means that the state’s Dept. of Motor Vehicles is not notified of the violation as quickly. If the offender commits another DWI offense before the first is placed on his DMV record, he would not be properly charged for the second offense, which could put the public at risk.

"If an order for an arrest warrant for someone who failed to appear on assault charges sits for an unreasonable amount of time – even a week – it means that person is not being held responsible for his actions," added Hurley.

"When you’re short-staffed, you apply your existing manpower to the people standing in front of you. The paper tends to wait. But the paper is very important – it’s not just paper, it’s the enforcement of court orders. We need accountability; the court’s actions need to be enforced for our justice system to be effective," she said.

In addition to a threat to that effectiveness, the delays in case processing also leave litigants and attorneys frustrated that their matters aren’t being resolved quickly. That frustration manifests itself in phone calls or walk-in visits to the court clerk’s office regarding the delay. The snowball effect: The more complaints staff members have to deal with, the more time taken away from processing cases. "The more we get behind, the more calls we get. The more we’re on the phone, the less we get done," said Howard.

Buttrick agreed. "We’re getting more and more calls asking, ‘Where is my order?’, which requires us to stop processing cases to answer those calls."

Howard has resorted to closing Strafford Superior at 4 p.m. each day to give staff time to get some work done without answering phones or helping walk-ins – with the exception of emergencies. She also sent a memo out to all attorneys practicing in Strafford County notifying them of the staffing shortage and asking them to "talk to your clients and lower their expectations about how quickly their cases will be processed." She posted signs notifying litigants of the staffing shortage and reminding them that "being nasty or rude will not get your case scheduled, processed or heard any faster."

Hurley sees that litigants whose matters aren’t being resolved quickly are beginning to feel that the system doesn’t work for them. At Manchester District Court, staff shortages are hitting the small claims department the hardest, because it is the only area with "squeeze room" in terms of time sensitivity. "But it’s also the area where we provide the greatest service to the public. If they have no access, they begin to feel disenfranchised and that the system doesn’t work for them," she said. "It’s important we (the courts) stay current with all of our work because what we’re doing ultimately affects people’s liberty."

Continuing to under-fund, and therefore under-staff, the courts is eating away at the morale and adding to the stress of court staffers, the clerks said. "I think morale is miserable in the entire system – not to imply that it’s resulted in employees showing less dedication to serving people or to their jobs," said Hurley. "But they have a sense that their service is not valued, that their professionalism is not respected or understood by anybody. Their jobs are interpreted as basic, but the laws are very complex. There is a lot of value in what these people know," she said.

"It’s demoralizing for the staff," agreed Howard. "These people were working at full capacity two years ago – they’re willing to pitch in, but after a while it’s just unconscionable not to get them help, to ask them to do more."

Ironically, the clerks said, the Legislature is approving increasingly complex laws and mandating that more forms accompany certain actions, which contribute to the extra work of court employees, yet the Legislature doesn’t fund the resources to meet the extra need. "The complexity of the domestic violence law has changed greatly since it was enacted, but the court resources haven’t changed at all," said Hurley.

According to Buttrick, "The Legislature has created more work through programs like the Child Impact Program, which is very staff- and time-intensive, but has not given us the concomitant resources to deal with that."

There is no relief in sight for these short-staffed courts. Vacant positions will be left unfilled indefinitely to save money, and the eventual process for filling those positions will be lengthy: Courts are required, as they have been for some time, to first justify each position with the AOC before a vacancy is advertised. Then there is a learning curve of about six months for a new employee, as well as the time taken away from an experienced staffer to train the new employee. As a result, each vacancy puts the court farther back in its efforts to efficiently process cases. And as increasing numbers of experienced court employees feel overworked and underpaid, they are leaving the court system, creating more vacancies.

The reduced number of Superior Court jury trials will also further contribute to backlog. Howard and Buttrick estimate that 14 to 15 percent of their cases go to trial – but more importantly, setting a jury trial encourages people to settle their cases, said Howard. With a reduced threat of their case going to a jury reasonably soon, fewer cases will be settled, she fears.

In addition to shifting staff from one department to another, the clerks will have to continue searching for creative ways to compensate for being short-staffed. For example, Strafford Superior relies heavily upon interns from the paralegal program of Dover’s McIntosh College. Seventy percent of Strafford Superior’s judge time is spent on the bench – which Howard considers quite efficient. The court has also begun giving out handwritten hearing notices in the courtroom in lieu of more formal notices being mailed out, saving on time and manpower to create computer-generated notices. "We’ve gone back about 20 years by doing that. It’s not what the court wants in terms of formality, but it’s an absolute necessity at this point," Howard said.

In an attempt to process small claims cases put on the back burner, Hurley has created mediation dockets to try to get as many small claims matters as possible resolved through mediation – which depends on attorney volunteers.

Until additional resources are allocated to the courts, however, these efforts will be little more than "damage control," as Howard put it. As they deal with more and increasingly complex cases, it is nearly impossible for the courts to catch up on the backlog of cases that has developed as a result of years of – and continued – under-staffing.

"We’ve cut, cut, cut. We’ve cut all the flesh, now we’re down to the bone," said Howard. "It’s chipping away at the court’s stature and its effectiveness."

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