The root of the problem is that New York state’s courts have been tasked with doing more with less—$170 million less. While that impact has been spread around the state, many courts in New York City have seen dramatic effects.

At the end of last year, the New York City Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA) commissioned a report (see sidebar), conducted by its task force on judicial budget buts, to find out the impact of the 2011-2012 fiscal year cuts. They surveyed 759 people, including private practice attorneys, court system employees, government attorneys and judges. Over 80 percent of respondents reported that they strongly agreed or agreed that the court’s efficiency has been compromised and that the budget cuts have had a negative effect of the administration of justice.

The cuts include offering early retirement packages and putting a freeze on hiring new employees, in addition to layoffs. Interpreters are harder to find, and security has been reduced. The courts have also practically eliminated overtime, and in perhaps the biggest and most consequential change, implemented shorter hours, closing the courts at 4:30 p.m. instead of 5 p.m.

“It was a drastic budget cut that had not happened before. The court budget had not been slashed in decades,” said David Bookstaver, communications director for the New York state court system. “We are good partners in government. We realize our budget was cut because of the incredibly difficult fiscal times that the state was going through at the time.”

The cuts come as a direct result of a dire budget situation for the entire state. Although the state court system, as a third and separate branch of government, doesn’t submit its budget in the same way that state agencies do, it is not immune to the fiscal crisis that has hit every state-funded entity in the past year.

Bookstaver said that the chief administrative judge, A. Gail Prudenti, who supervises the administration and operation of the state’s trial courts, did not take the cuts she imposed lightly.
“We have not had to lay off anyone in the court system in almost two decades, and we had to lay off over 400 employees,” Bookstaver said. “The chief judge felt that the court’s mission was to not close courthouse doors, as other states were forced to do.”

Slashing services and staff across the board was the better alternative to closing courts for a full day every week, Bookstaver said, but acknowledged that that extra half an hour lost every day isn’t just two and a half hours a week. The reduction in overtime allowances means that if a witness in a trial is ready to testify at 4 p.m., a judge might push the testimony to the next day, instead of risking running past 4:30 p.m. In the past, judges would routinely stay until 5:30 or 6 p.m. in order to finish out a motion or hearing, so the real time lost is much more substantial than a scant 30 minutes.

“You will start a hearing and continue it weeks later,” said Stewart Aaron, the president of NYCLA. “There are these long delays in getting resolutions with matters that are important to the litigants, leaving people and issues in complete limbo. Obviously that’s not the way to administer justice.”
Some attorneys say that the cuts disproportionately affect those who should be getting the most help to navigate the system.

“We saw an almost immediate impact on the court, because there were both layoffs and earlier closures. The shortened hours definitely are a hardship in civil court,” said Dora Galacatos, senior counsel to the Feerick Center for Social Justice at Fordham Law School and a volunteer with the Civil Legal Advice and Resource Office, which helps low-income New Yorkers being sued for debt collection. Galacatos said that the court heard over 134,000 debt collection cases in 2011 alone, and that the defendants in these cases often have a difficult time getting through the process.
“Many of them are economically distressed and working poor people, so shortened hours mean less flexibility in getting to the court,” Galacatos said. Other services designed to help working people, like free childcare programs, have been cut, forcing parents to drag small children through a day in court. Small claims court used to stay open several nights each week to accommodate people who work during the day, and is now only open on one night.

The cuts have a ripple effect on litigants and the system as a whole. If someone is supposed to be in court at 3:45 p.m., they might take off work and head down to the courthouse with time to spare, only to be met with a longer-than-normal line to get through security and into the doors, due to reduced staff. Earlier closing times with less wiggle room means people are more likely to miss their times altogether, further burdening the court calendar.

In housing court, which is a specialized court that only exists in New York City, the urgent problems people come to address—tenants not receiving crucial services or landlords not receiving rent—are often stretched out and resolved in a matter of months instead of weeks.

“Let’s say you have landlord/tenant proceeding, a simple, easy case,” said Glenn Spiegel, a real estate and housing attorney and partner with the Newman Ferrara law firm. “The landlord starts a case against a tenant because the tenant didn’t pay their rent. How long is it going to take the landlord to get their apartment back? The landlord isn’t a corporate landlord, it’s an individual, relying on those rents to pay the mortgage debt. How much longer does it take the landlord to evict that tenant that’s not paying?”

In his experience, it’s now taking two or three months for these kinds of cases, Spiegel said—and that’s if everything is perfectly by the book with no mistakes in the paperwork. If something has to be resubmitted, that can double the amount of time, he said.

Spiegel said that these types of delays could also have greater ramifications for all renters in general in the city. Landlords, knowing that if a tenant doesn’t pay up they won’t have a quick recourse to get them out, could become more skittish in choosing renters and raise their required income threshold, locking lower and middle income residents out.

It’s costing everyone more money to drag out cases, whether in legal fees or time spent away from work.

“It’s already expensive enough to be involved in litigation. If you have to sue somebody, you’re talking about a private case,” Spiegel said, adding that he doesn’t like having to explain to his clients why a proceeding that should take a lot less time and cost them less is suddenly going on for much longer.

Family court litigants are suffering as well. Briana Denney practices matrimonial and family law through her firm Newman & Denney, and said that she’s unfortunately grown accustomed to incredibly lengthy cases over the past year.

“Families are really in crisis by the time they go to the court system, and most people have an expectation that it’s going to be dealt with expeditiously,” Denney said. “The cutbacks have really impacted how much time judges have to deal with people. Unless it’s the worst of the worst, like serious abuse or things like that, things are getting pushed out for months or even years.”
Denney recalled a custody case where a divorced mother moved out of state with her child, legally, and when the father sought to change the custody arrangement and get the child back, the judge sided with him—three years later.

“It’s a strain financially, and it’s a huge emotional strain,” Denney said. “When the issues are dealing with kids and visitation and custody, everything is in flux and it’s really stressful for [kids] too.”
Some involved with the courts say that the slowdown can’t be attributed to budget cuts alone, however. Louise Seeley is the executive director of Housing Court Answers, an independent group with a contract from the city to set up information tables inside housing court buildings, in order to assist pro se litigants—both tenants and landlords—who appear for housing cases and need help to understand the process and their rights.

“It’s hard to tell how much of it is the cutbacks or the economy, because filings are up,” Seeley said about the backlog in housing court. She said that some days there is standing room only at the clerk’s office. “With the economy, more people are falling behind on their rent. It’s a combination of less people being able to staff windows combined with increased filings.”

Another aspect of the economy that still haunts the courts is the foreclosure crisis. State Sen. Liz Krueger said that she’s heard from many judges how backlogged the civil court system has become across the state because of the avalanche of foreclosure cases that have inundated the courts.

“There still is an enormous problem with cases coming before the courts where whoever is doing the foreclosure does not have the correct paperwork and doesn’t have the facts, and the judge has to put a delay in the case and call them back,” Krueger said. “It’s a continuing saga of an enormous waste of court resources as well as pain to the people who are at risk of losing their homes.”

Krueger said that she’s supported increasing filing fees in certain cases in order to help alleviate some of the courts’ budget constraints, enabling them to hire more clerical staff and get everything running faster, but that none of the state bar associations has supported this kind of measure.

“If the banks created this problem, I think the banks should have an obligation through increased filing costs for going to court, to pay for the increased burden on our courts to ensure that justice is done correctly,” Krueger said of the foreclosure cases.

The Office of Court Administration is gearing up for another budget season and just presented its fiscal 2013 budget proposal to state lawmakers. Citing the continuing fiscal crisis that has been compounded by the astronomical costs of recovering from Hurricane Sandy, the OCA is asking for an even smaller budget than last year.

“The Judiciary’s General Fund Operating Budget request is $1.75 billion. The request is a decrease of $212,013 from the current fiscal year budget, a reduction of .012 percent,” the executive summary states. “This negative budget request is being presented in the face of a number of cost increases, including the second phase of the judicial salary increase, and contractually required increments for eligible non-judicial employees.”

In other words, it doesn’t look like this will be the year that positions, programs and hours get restored in the courts.

“The civil court is the people’s court. It used to be the jewel of the judicial branch,” said Spiegel. “There has to be a better solution than limiting access to the courts.”

Patrons at the Battery Park City library, which is part of the New York Public Library system. Photos BY Patricia Voulgaris

When people think of libraries, they think of taciturn old librarians, stacks of musty books and repressive quiet zones where the smallest sound is met with a harsh shush! The reality couldn’t be further from this image. Walking into the Battery Park City Library on North End Avenue, the first thing you notice is that it’s bright and sunny, with large open windows. Dozens of kids are playing quietly in a children’s area. Adults are sitting at computers doing research alongside young students doing their homework. It certainly isn’t filled with an oppressive air of silence—the library is a surprisingly vibrant community center.

Library usage in the city keeps going up—in the last fiscal year, the St. Agnes branch on the Upper West Side had nearly 300,000 visits and the entire NYPL system had 15.1 million—but funding continues to drop precipitously. Now the NYPL system is facing severe budget cuts again; the proposed 2013 budget slashes $36 million, a 32 percent decrease that, if implemented in the executive budget, would surely mean reduced hours, staff and services all around Manhattan.

“More patrons than ever are coming through our doors, checking out more materials, attending more programs and accessing more information,” said Dr. Anthony Marx, president of the NYPL, at a City Council hearing last month. “This cumulative cut means that [fiscal year] ’13 funding, excluding inflationary reimbursements, would be a full 44 percent lower than the FY ’08 adopted budget.”

It’s a particularly cruel irony that the same economic crisis that squeezes the library budget is the same force sending New Yorkers into those libraries in droves. Library advocates point out that the loss of hours and staff would mean fewer librarians to help people find and fill out job applications, fewer free activities for cash-strapped parents to bring their kids to and fewer English as a Second Language courses, one of the many types of free class the NYPL provides.

“Especially in an economic downturn, libraries just become more necessary,” said Lauren Comito, a librarian who runs the organization Urban Librarians Unite. She said she has probably helped over 1,000 people in the past six months search for jobs, write résumés and apply to positions online. Last year, 440,500 people attended job-related classes at the city libraries.

The steady decline in funding has forced libraries to get by on shoestring budgets and operate with military-like efficiency to avoid cutting services.

“The cuts have definitely been tough,” Angela Montefinise, director of public relations and marketing at the NYPL, wrote in an email. “We’re down 500 employees since [2008], and yet we still manage to have an average of six-day service around our system. We have worked extremely hard…to ensure that public service is not impacted by these cuts, but there’s only so far we can push to maintain that level of service as resources continue to decline.”

According to the NYPL, about $100 million of their $259 million adopted budget for FY 2012 comes from private donations, a number they say remains consistent. It’s the city money that fluctuates and that the system is constantly negotiating.

“I call it, in the words of Yogi Berra, ‘Déjà vu all over again,’” said Council Member Vincent Gentile, chair of the Libraries Committee. “It seems like every 10 months or so, we’re back to where we started.

“Last year, we had to close a gap of $3 million [after larger cuts were restored to the budget],” he said. “Now it’s come to the point that we’re looking at a gap of $96 million,” the total combined amount for the NYPL, which covers Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island as well as the research libraries, and cuts to the Queens and Brooklyn library systems.

Gentile said that the libraries should receive a baseline budget—something they can count on every year—but that he doesn’t see that happening in this administration.

“The fact that we haven’t baselined it really leaves everybody with no ability to plan and no ability to have some sense of security,” he said.

Maureen Sullivan, president-elect of the American Libraries Association, said that urban libraries around the country are suffering similar budget restraints and that lawmakers need to be made aware of the tremendous return on investment that libraries offer in terms of public services and community benefit.

“I think there’s really a need for the financial people, the policy makers to understand what people who work in libraries do and how people in the community use libraries,” Sullivan said. “It’s critical to recognize that the public library is often the only resource available for those in our communities who are not yet using the technology or don’t have the ability to get the information,” for things like online employment resources.

While job search resources are critical, local libraries also serve as cultural and social havens for Downtown residents. On a recent weekday afternoon at Battery Park City, a mother played with her young child in a foam play area. Behind her, several nannies talked amongst themselves as their charges read books or used computers. On the other side of the library, teens surfed the Internet or read books. A quick jog upstairs brings you to the library’s quiet area, where Tammy Keller helped her daughter go over her homework.

“I bring my daughter Olivia and her friends here, and it’s a bright, wonderful space. We do homework here, go to story time and check out books. If anything happened, we’d still come here, but we wouldn’t be as happy.”

Back downstairs, Lolita Atilola organizes a Spanish story time with two dozen infants and their parents. Through song, dance and puppets, Atilola immerses these young children in the Spanish language.

“Some parents take their kids here because they want them to learn about their roots or their culture. Others do this because they want their children to have an early exposure to another language,” said Francesca Coraggio, who manages the library.

Liza Polanco, 50, is a nanny for two children who are here for the Spanish story time. “If they closed the library or cut its hours, I don’t know what we’d do. Lots of children come here. We come here every week for the readalongs, the story times and all the other activities. They had animals at the library once,” said Polanco, as the children piped up their experiences with the animals.

“They had an owl here and it was the coolest thing ever!” said the little boy with Polanco.

“They talk about basically cutting the most vulnerable folks in this city who depend on us for access to ideas—the bedrock of democracy, the bedrock of an economy,” Marx said in his Council testimony. “That would demonstrate fewer items being circulated, libraries being closed, youngsters being deprived of access to books and programs. It really is a horror show.”

The New York state budget crisis, public school closings and potential cuts to senior centers were just some of the subjects discussed during a July 13 Upper West Side Town Hall Meeting at Goddard Riverside Community Center.

More than 300 West Siders packed the center to hear Upper West Side elected officials, including Borough President Scott Stringer, Assembly members Linda Rosenthal and Richard Gottfried, Council members Gale Brewer and Inez Dickens, as well as representatives from the departments of Education, Transportation and Environmental Protection.

After a short introduction, Stringer turned the floor over to the audience.

Many of the people in attendance wanted to know how the New York State budget crisis would affect the Upper West Side, from the closings of senior centers and public schools to inadequate unemployment benefits. The city’s $63 billion budget, which passed two weeks ago, includes a 20 percent decrease from last year in discretionary funding for community organizations.

Stringer promised the audience that he is trying to avert the public school closings Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed.

“When there are not enough seats in public schools, parents leave New York City, taking their tax dollars and their children,” Stringer said.

He also apologized on behalf of the government for proposed budget cuts to senior programs. Council Member Inez Dickens said her office has succeeded in saving three of the seven senior centers that were scheduled to close in her district, which includes parts of the Upper West Side and Central Harlem.

Residents also expressed their concerns about overdevelopment in Park West Village, with community advocates addressing the prospect of Jewish Home Lifecare, a nonprofit health care provider, building a 22-story nursing home on West 100th Street.

“It’s a disgrace,” Stringer said of the overcrowding of Park West Village.

But the topics were not all doom and gloom.

One woman proposed a law against putting spikes on ledges, saying that they injure people when they sit down. Stringer joked that he would introduce a “tuchus law.”

At one point, a former high school classmate of Stringer’s mentioned his recent engagement from the audience.

“I can’t believe you’re engaged,” she said. n

“It would be the worst cut in our history,” said Singer during a July 17 meeting of Community 7’s youth, education and libraries committee.

Six-day service is also under threat. West Side branches have already cut down on hours and instituted a hiring freeze. If the proposed changes go through, the surviving libraries would only open four days a week, according to Singer. Free programs for children would also be eliminated.

In response to the crisis, the library has instituted a fundraising and letter-writing campaign. To date, nearly 100,000 letters of support have been collected.

The committee also discussed the school that Extell Development Corp. will construct as part of its Riverside Center development. Issues under contention include financing, square footage, traffic safety and drop-off procedures. Because the new school will not have a ground level yard, parents will need to drop their children off on the sidewalk, or escort them into the school

“From a parent management perspective, that is a bad idea,” said Mark Diller, the committee’s chair. “There are some kids that just can’t let go. Also, having adults walking around the building—there is a safety issue.”