Fretting the rising costs of operating Auburn’s Municipal Court, City leaders are weighing, among other options, whether to contract out the court’s functions to King County District Court.
Recently the City asked KCDC to explain what it could do.
Members of the City’s Municipal Service Committee met last week with Corinna Harn, chief presiding judge of King County District Court, and her staff to talk about a proposed inter-local agreement between the KCDC and the City of Auburn, to learn what the court could offer Auburn, and to explore whether it could do everything the Auburn court now does while saving the City money.
Costs associated with the Auburn court, probation — alternatives to jail — and incarceration are expected to pass the $10 million per year mark, about 18 percent of Auburn’s general fund budget, by 2013, City Finance Director Shelley Coleman told the committee.
Sentencing practices, probation services and alternatives to jail that the Auburn court uses to respond to the increasing number of offenders sentenced to jail keep driving the costs up. Today, Auburn has 700 offenders in one program or another at any given time, with the City paying for most of the 700 urine samples and analyses performed per month, paying for alcohol and drug rehabilitation, mental health services, electronic home monitoring and more.
Faced with like rising costs, 12 King County cities, including Burien, already contract with KCDC.
Extrapolating from data drawn from contract-city Burien and using that city — KCDC sends Burien’s misdemeanant inmates to the SCORE jail just south of Seatac Airport as Auburn does — as an “apples-to-apples comparison,” Harn said, the City of Auburn would see its average daily population at the jail decrease significantly, resulting in significant cost savings.
“Burien’s not that different in the kinds of cases it creates than yours,” Harn, but KCDC judges are, on the whole, more inclined to find less costly alternatives to jail than their peers in Auburn.
“I think it has a lot to do with (judge philosophy) … but it’s also making sure that people who are booked there get in and out when they don’t need to be there. We have a lot of systems in place to make sure, for example, that they appear in front of the judge via video.
“We have made a concerted effort to only put those people in jail who really need to be there. And if there are other alternatives, whether it’s work release, or home detention, we use those in lieu of jail whenever that’s appropriate. It doesn’t mean we don’t send people to jail for a long time on the appropriate cases, but our judges are fairly conservative dealing with the other alternatives before that,” Harn said.
Councilwoman Largo Wales pressed the point.
“So what you are saying is that if you were here in Auburn, using our population, you would probably cut our (average daily jail population) in half,” Wales said.
“Yes,” said Harn, “or more.”
Based on Auburn’s 2010 case data and KCDC’s 2010 operating budget, King County’s proposal is for $1.9 million. Costs associated with the public defender were removed from the court budget and the cost to maintain the court facility by the City was included in the overall KCDC cost
Should Auburn contract with KCDC, the court would operate out of the building on East Main, leasing space in return for cost of services included in the proposal.
The proposed inter-local agreement for services includes services such as re-licensing, mental health court, veterans court, drug court relicensing court, in-custody calendars six days a week, commissioned law enforcement officers and screeners for courthouse security and electronic court records. People would be able to access court records around the clock from their personal computers, pay tickets and file civil and small claims cases in Auburn instead of having to go elsewhere.
According to the agreement, the City could request a different judge each year. The agreement would be for five years with the option to renew for another five years.
