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On June 29, the Clerk of Courts Operations Corporation (CCOC) met to amend the budgets for all clerks for the current fiscal year ending September 30. The cuts were required due to a reduction in revenues in our trust fund. Revenues into our trust fund have been declining for the past six years and have been insufficient to fund our budget for the past four years. Until this year, the Legislature has funded the shortfall in our trust fund as it has for the courts. This year, while continuing to fund the courts trust fund deficit, the Legislature elected not to fund ours. The results are that all clerks took a five percent reduction in our budget.
Cuts in our budget mean cuts in personnel. Approximately ninety percent of our budget is personnel costs with most of the balance going for office supplies, copy machines and other operational expenses. In the 14 years since I've been your Clerk we have reduced the number of employees from 208 to 155. Our budget has declined  since 2005 from $6.875 million to $5.7 million. That is a 17 percent decline over 10 years. If we are unsuccessful in getting additional resources from the Legislature, our budget beginning October 2016 will likely decline another four to five percent. During this time the number of judges, attorneys and citizens we serve has increased. We've been able to use technology to offset some of these cuts and also enhance services, but there are still many functions that require a live body.
Our office has been freezing non-critical open positions for the past six months anticipating that the Legislature might not fund this year's deficit. So while I believe we will be able to avoid layoffs for the next three months that does not mean services will be unaffected. Many of our duties and responsibilities are defined by court rule or statute and are not discretionary. We will still be sending a clerk to court to attend each session of court. What we won't have is as many people answering the phone, getting copies, pulling files, collecting payments, etc. We are evaluating reducing our office hours and clearly, if there is not some relief in next year's budget, cuts in services will be much more severe.
You may be asking, "What happened to all the revenues?" We are funded from a portion of the revenues we collect. We keep about half of the revenues; the balance is deposited into a variety of trust funds as set forth in Florida statutes. During the 10 years we've been funded  by the State, there have been changes in both the specific revenues we receive and other changes that affect the amount of money received. Some of the cases we process cost us less money to handle than the revenues we receive, and in other case types the cost of processing exceeds the revenues we receive.
Here are a few easy examples: The clerk keeps a portion of the revenues for civil traffic citations; there are dozens of trust funds that participate in the distribution of the revenues. Even so, civil traffic citations generate more money for the clerks' trust fund than the cost of processing them. Historically, traffic citations accounted for half of the revenues that fund our office. On the other hand, domestic violence generates no revenue. The cost of processing felony cases also greatly exceeds the revenues we are able to collect. While the fines are sufficient to fund the operations, we've not found an effective method for collecting money from defendants in prison.
When the funding model was put into place I think there was a general assumption that the mix between cases that generated excess revenues and those that generated cost in excess of their revenues was constant. Experience has shown that not to be accurate. The newspaper has reported that major crimes in Tallahassee are rising while at the same time the number of traffic citations has declined even more rapidly. Law enforcement has begun using civil citations for first-time offenses that, up until a couple of years ago, would be processed through the courts. Again, these first-time cases tended to generate revenue greater than their cost and those cases are being diverted to other sources.
I could cite other examples, but I believe this is representative of the problems we face. As I mentioned in my prior article, I ask for your patience and assistance as we cut our budget and adjust our services. If you have any question, please give me a call at 850-577-4005.
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