Right.
Good morning, everybody.
Just a couple preliminary things.
She justice designee, Hudson is here with us.
So welcome.
This is also Judge Fritz's first meeting with us.
So welcome.
And then I have
a new piece of jewelry here, which I don't know if you can see.
I could walk around if you need me to,
but it's a nickel
on a necklace.
Does anybody know the significance of the nickel on the necklace?
Shelly does.
That is what we return to the general fund.
Yes. Yes, Dan? Yes.
We'll hear more about that later.
Okay.
So let's dig in on the first item on
the agenda is to approve the minutes from the August meeting.
And there are a number of
edits proposed in the in the minute, in the draft minutes
and your materials there.
All the changes are all highlighted in yellow.
Any other
additions or corrections to the minutes?
All right.
If not, then I'll take a motion to approve the minutes as amended.
All those in favor signify by saying I.
All right, post.
All right. The minutes are approved.
Thank you.
Item number two is a follow up on our governance discussion.
So at the August Judicial Council meeting,
Judge Lawson and Judge Conroy gave an update on discussions between MDA
members and council representatives as a result of the discussions.
It was requested that MDA come back with a twofold commitment
one, to govern with one voice, meaning that MDA would not take positions
that are inconsistent with judicial council decisions.
And two, that MDA would respect the separation of powers principles.
MDA, for its part, asked for commitments from the Judicial Council
that there would be no sanctions or threats on the table
so long as ABG commits to those two basic principles.
And I want to just call on Judge Lawson now to update us on
the governance discussions.
Judge Lawson, good morning. Thanks, Chief.
It's a short update.
We did not receive the commitment from MDA at this point.
So what we are recommending, at least our small group
that was put together to meet with the MDA folks
is that we carry this matter over to our next council agenda
that will give our group an opportunity to meet with new leadership from MDA
following the elections that they're
going to be having coming up in just a couple of weeks.
Okay.
So that's the plan.
Any questions, comments, thoughts?
All right. Well, thank you.
Yes, you go ahead. Just comment. Good. Yep.
And, B.J., to join,
you can back me
allow
for new leadership to consider the issue.
Also, if there is any greater clarification
that can be provided to the questions that were not answered.
I'm happy to carry that back to our board.
We'll be discussing it at the fall conference.
So thank you for the additional time.
Thank you, Judge Conroy.
Any anything else on this topic from
anybody?
Okay, great.
Item number three is a discussion item.
This is an update from the One Corp Minnesota hearings initiative.
And let's see, Kristen and Heather are going to give that presentation.
I'm not sure who to call on first, but take it away.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you, Chief.
Good morning.
Well, Kirsten is setting up.
I'll just introduce myself.
I am Heather Kendall.
I'm the district administrator in the Second Judicial District,
along with Judge Kathy Manzarek.
I am the co-chair,
one of the co-chairs of the Minnesota One Court hearings initiative.
Judge Manzarek is unable to make it today.
So with me, I have Kirsten Miko,
who is the high evaluation and organizational team lead.
Quite a mouthful, but she does all of our data and evaluation in short.
So today we wanted to provide you with some of the progress that
we've made this summer.
Our presentation will focus on midpoint
data that we've collected from the flexible courtroom concept pilot,
and we'll also share with you the results of our hearing participant
survey, which we conducted earlier this year.
From there, we'll share some of the efforts
that are on the horizon that you can expect in the near future.
So that's a quick overview of what we'll be talking about today.
So first, we're going to touch base on these flexible courtroom concept.
So the flexible courtroom concept
framework just by way of reminders, a little bit of background on the screen
for you really is only applicable
to criminal hearings in juvenile delinquency hearings.
You can see the hearing exceptions
on the next slide.
And what we wanted to point out
here is these are the ones that we felt
strongly should be in person due to their complexity
and just the other logistics around it.
All the other hearing types, though, are flexible and our motto is
we don't care how you appear, just if you're
all right.
A little bit more background.
This outlines our start dates and the judges
that are working within the pilot.
So we launched this last December.
That's when our first round of hearing notices went out
and then those hearings were actually held on the dates that you see on the screen.
That's when they started.
So Becker and Ramsey have a little bit more.
We have a little bit more time under our belt then Meeker.
And that will kind of play into the data that you see here coming up.
So since the beginning of the year, there have been
almost 4300 hearings held under the flexible courtroom concept.
Most of these hearings have been held for adult
criminal felony and gross misdemeanor cases.
Becker and Ramsey counties
held more hearings under the framework,
as I mentioned, because we started just a little bit sooner.
All right.
So now we're going to get into some data.
Again, this is just very preliminary, but we wanted to show you
what we've been seeing.
So starting off, this is how parties appeared
for the hearing when the child or defendant was not in custody.
So during our hearings, the FCC hearings,
when the child or defendant was not in custody, parties tended to appear
remotely most of the time in Becker and Ramsey counties.
However, here. And that's for juvenile.
However, the experience in adult criminal has been more mixed.
So we see parties appearing remotely
in Becker and even split in Meeker
and then mostly in-person in Ramsey County for adult criminal.
So here's another snapshot for you.
This is where this is how parties appeared for the hearing
when the defendant was in custody.
So under this framework, when the child or the defendant,
they would obviously appear as the facility
instructed them to appear.
So for all of us, this meant for most of us anyways.
This meant most parties appearing remotely, except for, of course, in
Ramsey, we have a sheriff's office who does not allow
for remote appearances.
So you see a large majority there, of course, of in-person in Ramsey.
But all the other parties did appear kind of both remote and in-person.
So we had a little bit of a hybrid there.
So we want to turn our focus now to juvenile delinquency exclusive of Lee.
You'll see on the screen here, we just have Ramsey and Becker.
We don't quite have enough data for Meeker yet.
So what we're finding here is that two thirds of Becker
County juvenile delinquency hearings were held entirely remotely,
and about half of Ramsey's
FCC hearings in juvenile delinquency were held entirely remotely.
So kind of an interesting split there.
We'll see a little bit.
We'll see another view of that in a little bit here.
Turning our attention to adult criminal in looking at
this data, what we're seeing most Becker County hearings were held remotely,
while less than 10% of the Ramsey County hearings were held remote.
We have speculated on why this might be, but I think we're going to need to do
some focus groups to really understand why that is so more to come.
And then Meeker had a nice mix of both in-person and remote hearings.
So we're very excited to see
how this is all going to turn out
and how this develops over the rest of the year.
We've received a lot of positive feedback on this.
We've had actually other agencies
ask us, Hey, how do we get in on this?
So that's the good news.
What I would say, though, is that what you've heard today
only really tells part of the story.
I mean, this is just a small snapshot of the data.
We need to learn why we're seeing certain trends.
I alluded to that earlier.
We also need to understand the impact of this model on our staffing levels,
on judicial officer well-being, on staff well-being.
We need to understand better the attorneys and litigants experience.
So just wanted to qualify this great information,
just a snapshot, but there's a lot more that we need to learn as we go.
So now I'm going to turn it over to Michael
and she's going to talk about our hearing participant survey.
Okay.
Thanks so much, Heather. My name is Kirsten. Michael.
I am the Evaluation and Organizational Learning Team lead for Ohio.
So my role includes bringing data to the Ohio Steering Committee
to help them make informed decisions about the future of hearings.
So I'm going to talk a little bit
about the hearing participant survey that we just wrapped up in June.
And by way of reminder, the hearing participant surveys
that to gather input from litigants, attorneys,
justice partners, media and other hearing participants
on their most recent remote or in-person hearing
hearing participants were asked a variety of questions
about their hearing experience, barriers to participating in the hearing,
and their preference for attending a hearing in person or remotely.
So the responses really provide us some important insights
into the preferences of court customers, attorneys
and other hearing participants on how hearings are conducted.
So I did just want to
say we are really grateful to all of the judicial officers
and staff that have helped to promote the survey over the last few months.
And we're pleased to report excuse me,
that the hearing participant survey yielded several thousand survey responses,
and we know 3500 responses is just a small part of the total
number of hearing participants that our courts have served this spring.
The survey responses do provide a representative cross-section
of the Minnesota population and a very reliable sample
of the state's hearing participants.
Statistically speaking,
we have exceeded the number of responses needed to gather a reliable sample.
And as I said, self-reported demographics were similar to the state.
Overall, this was intended as a statewide survey to capture a broad perspective.
So this is this is really good news. That's what we were looking for
with this.
We do recognize that demographics and respondent numbers may not reflect
each specific county court, customer, subgroup
or case category.
You can see the full report on the hearing participant
survey results included with the materials for this meeting.
It does include
more details on our findings and the characteristics of respondents.
If you're curious about that,
the report will also be going out internally via a branching out article
next week, and it's currently available on the Ohio Communication Hub.
So I'll get into a little more detail.
But overall,
we're seeing that hearing participants expressed really high satisfaction
and their district court hearing experiences.
Hearing participants shared that remote hearing attendance
as at least as accessible, timely and effective as attending in person
and in some cases more so.
The survey
responses point to remote hearing attendance providing greater access, while
also meeting the needs and interests of most stakeholders.
Okay, so we're going
to start looking at the data by looking at access.
And this is a key piece of Ohio's vision for hearings.
Our survey results show that remote hearings provide
easier access to hearings for litigants and other hearing participants.
So in this chart here, we see that around three quarters of litigants
attending their hearings remotely said that they did not experience
any difficulties attending their hearing.
However, only less than half of litigants attending in person
said they did not experience any difficulties.
Okay.
We did also ask about the specific barriers
to attending hearings for litigants in other hearing participants,
And hearing participants did select several
different barriers to attending their remote and in-person hearings.
But the most frequently cited challenges for litigants attending hearings
were taking time off work
to attend their hearing, traveling to their hearing and challenges
related to their physical or mental health.
All of these barriers were an issue for in-person
hearing participants much more frequently than remote hearing participants.
Other barriers also included safety concerns, child care
and technology issues.
And the breakdown
of the full list of barriers to attending hearings can be found in the appendix
of this presentation or in the written report.
So I'll now
talk a little bit about some aspects of hearing effectiveness,
which is another key aspect of Ohio's vision.
One of the most the more surprising findings for us
was around attorney client communication before and during hearings.
Most attorneys and litigants felt that they were able
to sufficiently communicate with their attorney or client as needed.
Interestingly, litigants and attorneys reported more satisfaction
with the level of communication during remote hearings.
Compared to in-person hearings,
attorneys
also reported more satisfaction with the level of communication
with their clients before their remote hearing.
The number of attorney responses to these questions
for in-person hearings were somewhat low at only 36 people.
So I did want to just say it's hard to draw definite conclusions
from the comparisons.
However, it's clear that almost all attorneys and most litigants
attending remotely reported sufficient attorney client communication.
So this interesting response and the explanation
for that response.
Yes, I guess I mean,
I think there could be many things at play we don't really know.
It's possible that, you know, maybe the in-person hearings,
because of the more serious nature of the case, people expect
a lot more communication in those hearings.
That's a possibility.
It could be that really
people are feeling like they're able to communicate via breakout rooms, via
whatever means is set up by the courts for the remote hearings just as adequately.
So, yeah, I don't know for sure.
Okay. So
we also had
some data on hearing seriousness and length.
This was also interesting that litigants
in other hearing participants were more likely to be satisfied
with the seriousness and amount of time their case was given during the hearing.
If they attended remotely.
These results again may be influenced by the fact that evidentiary hearings
in more serious cases are often currently held in person, according to the policy.
525 Presumptive Chart approved by counsel
and the local criminal hearing plans.
Like most hearing participants, were
also more likely to be satisfied with their ability
to focus on the hearing without distractions.
If they attended remotely.
However, court partners such as city and county prosecutors
and the state Attorney General's office were more likely
to be satisfied with their ability to focus if they attended in-person
OC. Similarly,
most hearing participants were more likely to easily understand
what was happening during the hearing if they attended remotely.
Court partners again more often reported that it was easy to understand
what was happening.
During hearings, they attended in-person.
Okay.
Another aspect of Ohio's vision is timely hearings.
Litigants and other hearing participants reported
more satisfaction with the time they waited for their hearing to begin.
When attending remotely.
Okay,
so given all of these things that we just looked at,
what then do our hearing participants prefer?
Over three quarters of hearing participants would prefer to attend
a future hearing remotely.
Attorneys representing clients and litigants were more likely
to prefer attending remotely.
Most court partners and prosecutors still preferred attending remotely,
but not as large percentage of them compared to other hearing participants.
So overall, we have a few
kind of key takeaways from the survey data.
The survey reinforced some of what we already suspected
and provided some surprising results for us to think more about.
Importantly, we learned that hearing participants in our district courts
are having mostly positive hearing experiences
attending hearings, both remotely and in-person.
So that's that's great news.
Our data confirms that attending a hearing remotely
has great benefits for reducing barriers to our courts, especially for litigants.
The increased convenience and accessibility of remote hearings
has led many hearing participants, especially litigants and attorneys,
to prefer to attend the hearing remotely.
As Ohio continues to work on its long term recommendations
for the future of hearings in Minnesota,
these survey results will be combined with other hearing data and stakeholder
feedback, both internal and external, to give us a richer understanding
of how to support accessible, effective and timely hearings across the state.
So we'll close with a preview
of some of those data collection efforts.
Go on.
Can I just ask, do we know generally response rates?
So we don't we can't calculate a response rate
because the way that we distributed the survey was so broad, we put it out
on the zoom, redirect e-mails in the courthouse.
So and the population is so large, it's really not possible.
We do know that the number of responses that we got provides us
a very reliable sample with a very small margin of error for our state.
So thank you.
Have any other questions before we go on?
Yeah, go ahead, Sarah.
Oh, thank you.
I was just wondering if
if there is any way to look at the number of hearings
that are scheduled on there on these calendars or if
there's a different
calendar structure being used for remote calendars
that could possibly cause some of these results, like having fewer
distractions, feeling like they have the full attention of everyone,
maybe more time, certain type of calendars.
Do you think that could be contributing to these results?
I'm just kind of wondering, because I get the sense
that we're scheduling fewer hearings on remote calendars.
And so I'm wondering if that's contributing to
some of these attention issues.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And that is something we're thinking about.
We do have some ability to connect local practices
to the survey data because we do have the county
reported on a lot of these surveys, what county the hearing was held in.
And we do have data on practices in different counties related to time.
Certain hearings and things like that.
So that is that is on the plan for analyzing the data.
It just will take a little more time.
So yeah, Okay. Thank you much.
I have a question going back to one of the comments
that Heather had mentioned here, the data on the flexible courtroom model,
because I think it applies to both of these reports and that's
the we really don't have any data on staffing in judicial wellness.
How much staffing and judicial officer need we have related to those.
And that's really been one of my big concerns about
these models.
And I'm wondering is all, hi, going to try to measure that?
Are we going to wait for the next weighted caseload study?
Yeah, yeah, a little bit of both, I guess.
I would say one thing we're doing is and I'm going to talk about that next here
is the resources and Practices study and that will give us some information.
It is not intended to be a timing study in the traditional sense
of weighted caseload, so that will come later.
But we're really
trying to understand the impact of the resources.
You know, as it relates to both
remote calendars, hybrid calendars and in-person calendars.
So as Kirsten said, I think we can match some of that to see,
you know, what practices and what staffing levels.
Chad, we talked about the tipping point.
So how many hearings do you have to have
in a calendar session before it tips to needing two people?
And what does that look like in a remote setting
versus an in-person setting versus a hybrid setting?
So I think those are some of the things we have to look at to really get
the impact of the staffing on these different approaches.
Thanks for that answer, Heather.
Just one other question, just because I don't know if more related
to the flexible courtroom model is are the
are the judicial officers and staff always physically in the courtroom?
Are they sometimes appearing remotely as well?
So that's something that's been pretty interesting.
I can speak for Ramsey and then I think I know the answer for the other two.
But we have representatives here so they can chime into in Ramsey,
our judicial officers have taken the position that they are in person.
They don't want a defendant or a juvenile to be there in
the courtroom without them.
But that's a philosophy.
I also know that I understand that Meeker and Becker,
the judges are sometimes remote, sometimes in person.
But I'll let you all speak to that and then Judge Bethany.
So in Becker and there's two and a half of us in Becker and it, it,
it really it varies, judge to judge in really day to day
and what your calendar looks like, because some days
you might just have a couple of juvenile arraignments
and then the rest of your calendar is remote.
And so that judge may choose to appear remotely, but
we always acknowledge that when we appear remotely, we acknowledge, hey,
you're in the courthouse, you're in the courtroom.
I'm not there with you today.
This is I mean, we acknowledge it
most of the time, though,
when there are people in the courtroom, the judges are there.
Judge Beckman,
there are two of us that do the criminal calendar.
And we are predominantly in the courtroom.
Any any other questions before yet, Judge Hennessey?
Heather, I'm wondering
the questions that were asked of the parties happened
sort of touch on the issues of procedural due process,
but don't directly go to whether a party thought
the hearing was fair, whether they were heard.
I'm wondering, do we know if the National Center for State
Courts has done any follow up research generally on remote hearings
and how parties, especially self-represented litigants, feel in terms
of whether they get access to justice in terms of those bigger principles?
Yeah, that is a good question.
And we have our Access and Fairness survey coming up in a few months,
which does touch on a lot of those questions
and we'll get local data on those those questions.
And there are other jurisdictions that have done the Access
and Fairness survey already in a remote hybrid in-person environment,
and they do have some findings
that, you know, access and fairness was
was not significantly impacted
by the hearing being remote or in-person.
But folks did feel like they're hearing was potentially more fair
or reported higher levels of access and fairness if they had a choice
between remote or in-person, which was an interesting finding.
So ties back to the flexible courtroom concept.
All right.
Any other questions before we move on, Judge Lawson?
Not really a question, more of a comment.
I just really want to commend Ohio
for digging deep and figuring out how to get litigant input.
I mean, when we were as a council struggling with this issue
related to remote or in-person, when we were developing
the initial framework, that was a big gap in information that we had.
And regardless of how hard we tried, we could not get litigant input.
That was significant enough to be statistically reliable.
And you have accomplished that. So kudos.
All right.
Thank you. Judge Lawson. Do you want to keep going?
Heather? Yep.
I'll just wrap it up here, just a few more slides.
So a couple of things on the horizon.
At the end of June, we wrapped up the resources and practices timing study.
I kind of talked a little bit about that earlier during that study.
Staff from 15 counties
recorded almost 20 or so sorry,
1200 calendar sessions
within those calendar sessions, that would be about 9000 hearings.
And we measured the duration of both the hearings and the entire calendar session
so that we could see what hearing
how hearing practices impact
those hearing sessions in those hearings.
So as ex practice making something
go longer or is it making it more efficient,
why versus why practice and so on and so forth.
So more to come on that we're excited to see what
we can learn about different practices from that study.
This fall.
You'll see that we are going to gather
a lot of additional feedback
was, I won't read the list to you.
I think it's on the next slide
because you can see it all on your screen.
But this is kind of where we bring
we talked about this kind of a holistic look at everything.
So you're going to see a lot more engagement with all of you.
There's going to be some judicial officer focus groups.
Some are already in progress. More to come.
We're going to have litigant interviews.
That's kind of a a fancy term for kind of focus groups,
but it's a nice new, interesting way to get to those folks.
There's going to be surveys to judicial officers and staff.
And then I want
I really want to highlight here as we are going to look at outcome indicators.
I mentioned this a little bit earlier.
How did the different hearing practices or, you know,
remote in-person hybrid impact failed to appear?
How do they impact time to
disposition or even number of hearings until you reach disposition?
So I think those things are really important.
So more to come on that.
And we talked earlier about the Access and Fairness survey.
So we're going to leverage information from that surveillance.
Well,
one fun, exciting thing.
We are finally almost, you know, to that pilot
finish line on the Department of Corrections scheduling.
This has been a huge pain point for all of us.
But I'm pleased to report the pilot starts on September 25th.
It's going to be at Saint Cloud in Faribault, and for all the districts
it will be available.
So we are excited for big things there.
So more to come
and I think that is it for us.
We really want to thank all of you
for your leadership
and your communication as it relates to the OGI efforts.
There's a lot of work being done and we appreciate all your time and effort.
It's really been a good collaborative group.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Other questions or comments from the council?
Well, I just want to thank you
on behalf of the Council, Heather and Kirsten and the whole group.
This is really transforming the work that we're doing.
And it's so important that the decisions the council makes are data driven
and the kind of muscular data evaluation that your group is doing is really
so helpful and foundational for us as we continue to make decisions here
and try to be the best we can be for the people we serve.
So thank you so much. Yeah, just
I was fortunate yesterday
to be on a panel at the Court technology conference
in Phenix with over 1600 participants from around the country.
And I was talking about remote proceedings and what we've done here in Minnesota.
The other participants were from Arizona and Utah,
and the Utah participant was a practitioner, an attorney
who chairs their access to Fairness Committee in Utah.
Practices in both federal and state court
is mostly a civil practitioner.
Obviously, I talked about what we've done here in Minnesota.
Arizona's done something similar following our lead.
Most other jurisdictions are still struggling with this.
But the most important
part of the presentation I thought was coming from the practitioner
and she said, I wish we in Utah
could make a decision like you have made in Minnesota,
because I don't know what's going on, where I'm going,
what's remote, what's in person, and just waiting the day before
to figure out what the decision's going to be.
And she said, We've been studying this
now for three years and we can't come to a conclusion.
And that's more frustrating than actually a decision being made.
So I was really privileged to be able to represent all of you
there, and I had a number of people from jurisdictions
coming up to me afterwards wanting our consulting services
as to how we could get their councils or their administrative bodies
or their Supreme Courts to really take this seriously, as we have in Minnesota.
So I just want to make sure everyone understood we people are watching
and we really are a model for the nation on this particular topic. So
thank you, Jeff.
All right.
Anything else on this topic from the council?
Okay. Thank you, Heather.
Thank you, Kirsten.
Let's move on then to item number four, the performance Measures Report.
And Jennifer,
Jennifer is here to present the report.
And then after Jennifer's part is completed,
we'll hear from the chief judges and the appellate courts.
Welcome, Jennifer.
Morning.
Okay.
All right. Good morning.
So I'm going to give provide the statewide overview of the annual
Performance Measures Report.
So in the presentation, we'll briefly review the branch goals,
why we do this work.
And then I'll just touch on a highlight of some of the results,
some positive and then some areas where we can improve.
And just a note that I'll focus on statewide
and maybe here and there to talk about some districts, but
the annual report that's in, including
the materials, has the full breakdown of results by district.
If you're interested in that.
Okay.
So it's the policy of the branch to monitor key results
that measure progress towards our six core goals.
This ensures accountability of the branch, improves overall core
operations, and enhances the public's trust and confidence in the judiciary.
So this is why we do this work. We do this.
We come to council twice a year, usually in the spring, in the fall, and be over.
Our performance measures.
So I'll start with the positive areas
where we're doing really well.
So clearance rates,
so clearance rates are an indicator
of how well the courts are keeping up with their incoming caseload.
Clearance rate is calculated as the number of dispositions
divided by the number of filings in a given time period.
So clearance rate of 100% indicates that we are keeping up
with our incoming caseload and clearance rates are consistently below 100%.
May indicate a possible growing backlog.
So while the last couple of years have been a focus on the major
criminal backlog, we've maintained
little to no backlog in any other case group in most other case groups,
and this is due to clearance rates at or above 100%.
So taking a closer look at the major criminal clearance
rate over the last 15 years, it has fluctuated quite a bit
Between fiscal year 12 and fiscal year 19, it was mostly below 100%.
And then in fiscal year 20 and 21 were the pandemic.
And obviously it's a difficulty decreased through the pandemic.
And so we did see in fiscal year 22 and 23 the highest
reporting clearance rates that we've had.
And this, of course, was the work that's been done to
for the work that's
been done for our statewide backlog reduction goal.
And it's been amazing.
So the next slide, we'll see
what the results have been of such high clearance rates.
So the a pending case.
So this is a snapshot of the active caseload over the last five, five years,
beginning with the pre-pandemic time of fiscal year 19.
And so fiscal year 2021, we see that steep increase
of our pending caseload due to those lower clearance rates that we had.
And then fiscal year 22 was when we implemented the statewide backlog
reduction goal.
And so we see the active funding cases start to decrease
and that goal continued through fiscal year 23.
And so we see it's going to continue to decrease.
So at its peak in fiscal year 21 through fiscal year 23,
the full pending caseload reduced over 20%
time to disposition.
So this measure assesses the length of time it takes the case,
the courts, to process cases.
And the the goal here well before we get into the goal.
So the amount of time that it should take
for cases to be disposed of on the case group.
And so the second column shows the number of months
that it should take for the courts to dispose the case
based on the peak of the case group in months.
And so for the goal, it's 99% of cases
should be disposed within the time an objective.
Otherwise, you can say that only 1% of cases
should be disposed beyond the timing objective.
So for dissolutions, in the middle 1% of cases were disposed beyond 24 months.
So that met the goal and major civil and domestic views were very close.
I should note here, though, too, that,
you know, working on
older, having older cases can impact the the backlog.
So over the pandemic, we've seen our pending caseload grow older.
And as those cases
finally do get disposed and as, of course, we're to clear those out, that would
that could continue to continue to see a major criminal.
The sorry sorry.
We will continue to see higher results for a major criminal
because we're still working to clear the backlog of some of those older
cases. Okay.
So then we'll get into some of the areas where we could show some improvements
and begin with the age of pending cases.
So this is a snapshot of time
and a snapshot of the number of cases waiting disposition.
So here we're looking at two different time periods for this, for this metric,
for this measure.
One is pre-pandemic back in July 2019, one is post-pandemic,
and that's the end of June 2023, which is also the end of fiscal year 23.
So for this measure
we're looking at only 1% of cases should be pending
or only 1% of pending cases should be older than the timing objective,
which is the same as time of disposition.
So, for example, for major criminal,
only 1% of pending major criminal cases should be older than 12 months.
And we see here
that in at the end of June
2023, there were 16% of pending cases that were older than 12 months,
and that compares to 8% around the same time back in 2019.
So we're not meeting the goal for any of the case groups.
In addition to that, the pending caseload is slightly older.
For most of the case groups.
The exception of minor criminal
when you compare end of June 20, 23 with same time back in 2019.
And so there's just
tying this back to this time disposition again
as we see these higher percentages of cases that are older
and pending beyond the number of months that we intended them to.
Once you disposed that will impact our time to this period
of time to disposition goals before you move off that slide, do we have any ideas
about why there was improvement in the minor criminal category?
I think one of
so if you look at the data, there's a lot of cases
that were like things certain districts really clear to watch, a lot of filings.
I want to say it was a couple of years ago,
kind of the beginning of the pandemic.
So I think they had a big impact on
like the time to permanency in adoption.
So statewide, the goals of having that 9% of children reach permanency by 18 months
and 60 60% of children adopted by 24 months were not met in fiscal year 23.
Neither goal has been achieved statewide since the bridge became important.
This information,
however, there have been several districts over the years
that have not met the goal for permanency, but have achieved
90% or higher
percent of children meeting privacy by 18 months, and districts have met the goal
over the years for 60% or more of children reaching adoption by 24 months.
It just hasn't been achieved statewide
race data collection rates.
So this measure is part of the fairness and equity goal.
So the goal here is that 80% of sorry, the goal here is that
we would like to achieve data collection rates of at least 80% for close cases. And
the strive for goal
is 90% for those cases for all case groups.
So since we've started collecting this measure or so report on this measure
in fiscal year 20, the rate data collection rates have declined.
This is also in line with the pandemic.
And we do know that we've been saying this.
We do know that it's been more difficult
to collect this information due to, you know, moving to remote hearings.
And so in fiscal 23, we don't see any statewide.
There are no case groups that are meeting the strive for goal.
However, we should note that there are several districts who are meeting
this 90% strive for goal with these case types.
So the First District is meeting the goal for two areas.
The fourth District is meeting this drive for a goal of having 90% or more
receipt of collection for four of the five areas,
and the eighth District is meeting it for one of the areas.
So it is possible and, you know, we can look to those districts
to understand more what they're doing. Some ideas
are you seeing. So
there's obviously some barriers
in this question.
So if if people were to refuse providing their race,
that would actually be part of that would be in the data.
So we would that would be considered something that we would have.
Because when you
look at rates right, right, right.
So this is we're just we're talking here missing data, data
that we just don't have. Correct
in question.
And one of the problems is
not as much as you raised,
is that something you might want to build into
another piece of that
and how we can better
address an issue, Right.
Yeah.
So little response to that.
One of the things we are working on as a state,
I don't think, or how you can claim it, we'd love to, but
is actually an E check and process
where race data is part of the check in process.
And that's where we've seen big success in person is with the check in kiosks.
So without that I think this e check in is going to be a great addition
To help us collect more of this information.
Is there any other quiet?
Dawn?
I'm just curious because when I look at these case types,
I don't know that these are the case types that we're mostly doing remote
and we're looking at criminal juvenile delinquency.
I understand the petty traffic, perhaps chips.
I'm just I guess I thought generally,
you know,
folks were doing more of these in person than they're doing them remotely.
So I don't really understand why we think remote may be having
as large an impact as claim to be saying it is.
So it could be that we're just not you know, it's that we're not prioritizing it.
Maybe, you know, with all the efforts that are going on,
maybe we need to, you know, be intentional about collecting this
and have that process set.
So but I can't speak to what's happened, but something that may be part of it.
Okay.
Any other questions before we keep going?
All right.
Keep going. Jennifer, thank you.
Okay.
So juror representativeness
so this is also part of the fairness and equity goal and measures,
whether jurors are representative of Minnesota communities
per policy five or 5.2.
This measure compares race and gender breakdowns of our jury pools to U.S.
census population data.
So shown here is a breakdown of fiscal 23 jurors
by race, ethnicity, also the jury management system.
The juror data in this slide reflects who reports for jury service juries.
Sorry, jurors are randomly drawn from the jury source list,
but only qualified and available jurors report for jury service.
So jurors who are disqualified, excused or do not respond to the summons
are not included here,
although the jury pool is not
expected to perfectly mirror community demographics,
the racial and ethnic groups with the greatest underrepresentation
have been highlighted and show
that Asian, black and Hispanic jurors are underrepresented, underrepresented
statewide compared to their share in the Minnesota adult population.
And then finally, separation rates.
So we can see here the separation rates, if they include resignations,
dismissals and layoffs that's designated by the denoted by the blue line on top,
the slide over the last 15 years, we can see that
they're slowly rising.
And then fiscal year 22, we see that they really significantly increase.
So that increase in fiscal year 22 was driven by the resignation
rate, which doubled from fiscal year 21 to 22.
So the resignation rate was pulled out just so you can look at it separately.
It's underneath, it's an orange.
So in
fiscal year 23, the resignation rate declined slightly.
And so we see that impacted by the separation
rate was impacted by that as well.
So the overall separation rate also declined.
So hoping to see that trend continue on the decline.
But that's separation rate and that's actually the end of the report.
So are there any other do you have any questions?
I'm happy to answer them.
Otherwise, again, I'll just let you know that all these breakdowns
by district are in the annual report.
If you're interested in that.
There or any other questions from the council before we move on,
Jennifer, in the data, is there data in the appendix
that tells us how the juror representativeness
that's reflected here, how that compares to prior years,
are we getting better or are we getting worse? Do we know?
I don't I
don't think we include that inside this report.
But I can get back to I mean, this was very this was very similar to last year.
I can say that there was a little bit of shift with the new census.
So from 28.
Yeah, but but as far as we know, mean
the numbers have not shifted too much from last year.
Any other questions for Jennifer?
All right, then, Will,
you should probably stay at the table in case things come up with the districts.
So we'll hear from the districts first.
And the chief judges were
asked to report on
a new initiative, process or program that has been implemented
and made the most positive difference in their performance in the district.
And what specific strategies or plans are in place to meet their district's
backlog goal or maintain meeting the goal if the goal has already been met.
So those are the two things we asked the chiefs to report on.
So now we'll see what they actually report on.
Judge, in no pressure.
I just want to say
that sometimes we could start with the ten thing go backwards.
I'm kidding. It's fine.
So. So we're always first.
I we're always first in the first, so that's fine.
You know, one of the things we've done overall, which I don't think
is terribly creative initiative,
is volunteer conciliation, court referees.
That really helps us free up our judicial officers to have to meet other goals.
We found specifically that the lawyers
that come in and do it, we're so dedicated
that are possibly better at it than district court judges.
We've had fewer appeals because they write these
nice orders and it really goes very well.
So I highly recommend it if you're not doing it.
I think one of the most important changes we made in our largest county
was restructuring the calendars that involve juvenile ability
to set chips cases and I think everybody knows
how challenging those cases are to set because there's so many parties and folks
and we need to have available dates so that we're meeting those timelines.
I think that was one of the most concerning findings
for us is that we were behind schedule of all the cases.
Those are the cases we don't want to be behind schedule again.
And so I think those are going to be positive steps to just make more dates
available and move those cases forward better.
You know, overall in our larger counties, we just find that
we're continually monitoring calendar size
and and being flexible and saying
while we need to put a second a second judicial officer here to take
part of this calendar so we get through these cases on any given day.
And I think our flexibility has really helped us in the long run.
I think we're able to do that with our weird
calendaring system or our unique calendaring system that we have.
And so that has worked well.
Some of the smaller counties have done a good job of prioritizing cases
and trial calendars and letting parties know
having contact with them in advance so that people don't
come to the trial date and say, oh, you know, we're we not prepared to go.
So we're doing more proactively
to make sure like, you know, you're up, be ready, let's go.
And that has kept things moving better.
McLeod
County is has done something interesting with their warrant reviews
that has they've designated specific calendars
and that has just worked better
for their judicial partners to get these weren't cases in
Scott County has moved to
specifically assigning to focus judges for juvenile delinquency
and parties and that has helped
our consistency with
we've decided it's important that kids not see
five different people every time they come to court
when they're seeing the same judicial officer.
It's it seems to be moving those cases more smoothly.
And we're having just greater effectiveness
with with these kids.
And finally,
we're couple of our counties are separating out our jury trial
calendar dates, setting one specific week for misdemeanors.
The other is for felonies and grosses, because otherwise your misdemeanors
keep getting kicked to the curb.
You know, they're always behind a case that's more important.
And we were finding we had so many misdemeanors
that we're getting older and older.
So that's really helped us resolve more of those
older misdemeanor cases.
We have.
We have met our backlog and yet we still are troubled by some really old cases.
And so now we send out a list in several of our counties,
the at the end of the week saying, hey, here are the cases next week
that are older than 365 days.
And so it just kind of gives people gets people's attention.
You know, we suggest them that they'll get some sort of bonus
or extra credit if they get rid of cases that are, you know, older than a year old.
And so it's actually helped just kind of raise people's awareness,
like, yeah, we got it.
We got to get these moving along.
So I think overall, those are the things that we've done.
If I've missed anything
in my
report here or if people have questions, I'm happy to answer them.
Any questions for the first.
All right.
Thank you.
Thanks, CASTRO
Thank you.
So as it relates to the question
asked the initiatives that we've implemented,
I want to highlight our
our housing initiative as a result of the moratorium
and the off ramp legislation that which ended in June of 22.
We in the second District experienced a 63% increase
in housing court filings compared to pre-pandemic years.
So between June 1st of 22 and June 30th of 23,
we had 5229 eviction cases that were filed.
That's about an average of a little bit over 400 a month.
This of course, resulted in an immediate backlog.
Those cases, and as everyone knows,
once those get filed, the statute requires that they have a hearing within 14 days.
So we
reached a peak of 972 pending cases in October
compared to pre-pandemic levels of about 140 or so.
So in response to that surge and after significant coordination
with our justice partners, we implemented remote housing events
to effectively double the weekly capacity of our of our hearings.
These Zoom events occurred twice a month beginning in November of 22,
with a max capacity on the calendar
of 175 cases per event.
During those events, we found that
67% of cases resolved.
The 14 those of those 14% of those resolving prior to the event and then 53
resolving during the event as a result
of negotiations with the court.
The events have been picking up
steam over the past two events, resulting in about an 80% resolution rate
at or prior to the event.
So thanks to these events, we're able to eliminate our backlog
in housing by the end of February of 23, with cases being set
with an initial appearance at least two or three weeks
after the initial filing.
So we continue to utilize that approach
to maintain that two three week turnaround with housing and
and hopefully get above pre-pandemic numbers.
So as a result of that and the the
I should say that we have one
referee that is a temporary referee, Bergstrom,
who is staffs these calendars
and she has done a magnificent job in getting these cases
moving and resolved, along with the staff at the,
you know, the court staff that have worked these calendars,
the Second District housing
team, the administrative team as a result of that was awarded
the 2023 Unsung Hero Award by the Minnesota Lawyer magazine
for that ingenuity and those tireless efforts to ensure
that these unprecedented high volume of eviction cases get filed
that were filed
after the moratorium were processed and heard in a timely manner.
Very proud of that team effort and those accomplishments.
As to the second question that was
presented, we continue to allocate additional
resources to the criminal case law.
We did see a significant improvement
in our backlog over the last
several weeks, along
with maintaining additional criminal calendars.
We have four judges that have been assigned additional trials
and date certain trial scheduling, which is something that, as we all
know, attorneys ask for regularly to have these certain trials.
We have all gross misdemeanor
and felony cases are assigned a trial date.
After their second hearing,
I took a page out of our friends across the river
and issued an administrative order requiring that all gross misdemeanors
that were over 180 days and all felonies that
were over 270 days
be assigned to a calendar.
To me after at their next hearing.
So nothing got shifted.
But if they didn't resolve
at the hearing that they were at over that time period,
they were assigned to me.
And and, you know, I think in their in person, of course.
And I think that's produced some pretty good results.
So we, you know, had those several resolution events
is if need be, we'll continue to have some more.
But our hope is to be done.
My goal is to be done with this backlog
and never say that word again has to
after at the end of this calendar year.
Thank you.
Please Castro thank the housing court staff on behalf of the council.
That's really remarkable and so appreciate it and celebrate
with you that great work.
There are
questions or comments for the second.
All right. Thank you.
Judge Beutel. What have we got going on in the third?
Yes, a couple of innovative programs that we have going.
First, the jury pilot that was started that's well underway collecting data.
We're providing potential jurors with the ability to receive their jury
summons and questionnaires and the four
most spoken languages other than English
in the third district, Spanish, Somali and Karen.
And this pilot provides a potential improvement for access
to justice, as well as a more diverse
jury pool by encouraging people who
were fit within those large language categories and may have some
English communication skills to show up
and try to participate in the process beyond the jury pool.
So that's underway and we are thankful to say court
administration and staff within our judicial district
who really put a lot of time and effort to get that new process set up.
So I just want to give a shout out to them.
Second, we have a centralized eviction calendar
this started in the pandemic with our money and retired judges
where we implemented a district wide eviction clinic for all 11 counties,
and these were centralize calendars where litigants would work with
southern Minnesota Regional
Legal Services to assist them in in the process
with their housing issues in 2022,
there were 962 eviction cases in the third
and fourth hundred 89 of those cases resolved at the first hearing.
So there was either access to
maybe some funds, emergency funds to pay some of the background,
or there was an agreement to
to to leave leave by the tenants.
So we voted at our recent judges
meeting to continue the program with Chamber judges.
And that is a sign through our equalization order that we have
today, we have 642
eviction cases and 225 have been resolved at the first hearing.
So we're still getting some good,
good traction and resolutions and good cooperation with the
Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services to to keep that program up and running.
As far as our backlog
goals are, we have targeted additional judges, judge unit
personnel and court staff to be assigned to do additional trial calendars.
And one of the counties with our larger backlog.
So we're getting that up and running and getting things calendar.
We're also kind of doing in some locales kind of a mini
pandemic court settlement conference where each month
your court leaders get together and they look at the scheduling
and really figure out, you know, what cases
can or should settle, what cases should be tried.
And we started these two initiatives
within the past few months are the fruits of our labor aren't
really running through the system yet because we got to get to that sentencing.
But then I think once we get to sentencing, we'll see a continuing
drop in our backlog numbers, which we're steadily working on.
So that's what's happening in the third.
And the council will get a full report
on the jury summons in pilot.
I'm not exactly sure the timing on I don't remember.
I don't know if you remember, Jeff, but
but it will come back to the group so that we can look at it.
And are you I guess I won't be here but can look at it to decide
any additional changes that we want to make statewide?
Any other questions for the third?
All right. Thank you.
Judge Barnett, are you on the zoom?
Yes, Yes.
Nice to see you, my friend.
Good morning. Nice to see you.
And see all of you.
Here's my report.
Excuse me.
In our criminal division
and December of 2022,
we implemented two new rules,
and that is similar to what Ramsey County has adopted.
But what we do is after three
court appearances for
our misdemeanor gross misdemeanor
felony cases, a trial date must be set.
Also, what we did for gross misdemeanors and misdemeanors,
if the case has been pending for more
than nine months since the first appearance,
those attorneys had to come see me for a hearing.
And that started in January.
The result of that,
we've reduced our major
backlog by 1776 cases.
Also, we participated in the statewide case
resolution event in April and May.
From that event, we eliminated
176 cases from our major backlog
out of 189 total cases involved in that event.
So that was a big success for us
in family court.
One of the things that we tried to do to make
our judicial officers more aware of what's going on
like we do in criminal and other divisions, we now share
the detailed performance measures with the bench
During their bench meetings, at least twice a year.
We've increased in family court,
domestic abuse, mandatory calendars to allow for the increase
in filings in that area.
Also in juvenile court, some good things are happening there.
We have a Rule 20 initiative in which we are connecting
young people with behavioral mental health specialists,
and we've seen a decrease in their failure to appear for those types of hearings
are we've changed some things with
our motor vehicle thefts.
We are getting youth into court
within three days of being charged.
And also we are especially assigning those cases
so they'll be blocked to a judge
for our pretrial services. Something great.
This just started happening.
That's helping us is that
juveniles were released from detention center.
We're connecting them with some services in the community
and that and from that we've been able to get them
to their court hearings and also connect them
with appropriate services before either case is resolved.
So that's been something that's been great for us.
What are we doing?
Specifics we're planning for the future
or strategies that we plan to continue.
We're moving forward with continuing
to require that trial date every three court hearings
that seems to be working for us instead of the
attorneys meeting
with me, if their case is pending for nine months or longer
on the misdemeanors and gross misdemeanor, we've decided to turn our focus to those
specific studies that are not keeping up with their caseload.
So we're going to target those folks, individual.
We continue to make data driven decisions
as we look at the backlog and
in that process,
we will compare where we are now in chief.
And we hope that in the next couple of months we can be at that 100%.
Mark. Thank you.
No, and I guess the message there, Judge Barnett, is
nobody wants to come and see you or Judge Castro.
And Judge Castro, you
help me out.
All right.
Any other questions and comments for the fourth?
All right.
Thank you, Judge Barnett.
But Judge Greg Anderson in the fifth.
Thank you.
So here are some of the things that we've been doing in the fifth
for any case, new initiative,
process or program, we've established specialized case processing of select
case types district wide, all case types in six counties.
And we're looking at expanding that in the future.
We've had case resolution events in
Brown, Martin, Pipestone and Redwood Counties.
We are using senior judge hearing remote misdemeanor calendars in Redwood County.
We are having order to show cause conferences
with court staff in guardian and conservatorship cases.
This helps keeps the cases off the judges calendars and provides
people who quite often will
just show up and file what they need to do or just be told they need to do it.
They'll have a conference with court staff ahead of time and they can guide them
through the process.
And then hopefully we don't have those set for hearings,
which gives us more time to deal with other matters.
We have
centralized processing and scheduling of child support cases
and we have been offering law clerks
SEAL is to assist them with
updates in the law
As far as specific strategies or plans in place to meet your
backlog goal,
We've we got a multi county conciliation calendar
in Lincoln, Lyon and Murray counties using a senior judge.
And again, this helps give additional time
for judges to work their criminal calendars.
We have continued to have biweekly remote misdemeanor calendars
using a senior judge in Redwood County.
And we have an additional case resolution event schedule for Brown County.
We're also using Multi-County eviction calendars and cerebral Martin
Jackson, Cottonwood Nobles.
And later on, counties again to help free up judge time from the eviction matters.
We've also
tried to and just by way of background, in
May through July ish of last year, we were leading the pack
as far as our backlog resolution.
And now we are, I believe, in last place. So
I think we are I'm not sure.
But it's it's been it's been disappointing and frustrating.
And so one of the things we've done is we've tried to identify
the good news is 13 of the 15 counties in our district
at some time dipped below settle their backlog.
There are two counties that have never gone below
the never resolved their backlog.
And then we've we've ticked up.
So we wanted to identify some the problems with or some some things
we can do to help those two counties that have never gone below the backlog.
And I've met
with one of the judges there and we've been discussing
optimizing calendaring and continuance policies.
They also have by far the highest jury
trial rate.
They have
15.8 jury
trials per weighted caseload, Judge in that county
and the district average is
five point something.
And without that county is 4.4
jury trials per weighted caseload, unit
And so we've been working on that and
we're trying to establish better communication with partners there.
It's going to require by inter the partners.
But that is, I think, something I know it's an initiative, but we've identified
a possible issue and perhaps that can make
an incremental change.
We've also tried to identify why
why did the counties backslide?
And I looked at what
I call the dirty dozen of a number of judges in our county.
Well, you know, you can you can get those reports.
And in those reports, it will tell you how long a case has gone on.
And the case number and I didn't do a deep dive, but I did look at them.
And certain themes
came up when I looked at and this was judges
from a couple of different counties and focusing on Earth County
because we had it resolved in July of last year.
And now we have a number of cases.
So the two themes that seem to some just got continued
and I don't know the reasons, but mostly the two problems were
rule 20 evaluation cases tended to float to the top
as far as length of time are of the list
for length of time and then BCA results.
And so we're taking a close look and I'm not offering this as an excuse,
but it's it's reflective of the problems we're facing.
And I'm if anybody has any ideas, I'll listen to them.
But I'm hoping to talk to our chief public defender about these issues.
But what we discovered was we ran numbers.
The most recent
date is September 11th of this week and
from the nine 1118 through nine 1120,
our district had annual a total of 147 rule 20 orders
throughout the district, 147 in three fourths of that time was pre-pandemic.
One fourth of it was for about six months was during the pandemic average
per judge in our district of 8.2
and the next two years,
we had an annualized total between nine 1120
and nine 1122, 267,
and from 911, 22 to 911, 23 306
in our most populous county, which is blue Earth county, five,
we have 31.6 in just this last year,
Rule 20 orders, that's 30.6 per judge
based on weighted caseload.
So the numbers are really,
I guess, shocking and disappointing that we have these issues.
I tried to look at how long the delay is and the best
I can see the best result is about two months delay
in the case.
But another statistic was the annualized total for that
first order of days was nine, 11, 18 and nine 1120,
we had an annualized total of 147 rule 20 orders filed
for rule 20 evaluations throughout the district.
In the last year we had 147 and blue Earth County alone.
The other thing that stood out was the two counties that have never met,
you know, gone below the or resolved their backlog.
They were two and three in number of of they were tied for second
in terms of rule 20 per judge.
So I I'm not sure
if that I think is reflective of our mental health crisis,
but I'm going to be talking to our chief public defender, hopefully
sometime before or during or after our meeting next week,
district meeting next week, and see what you know, what their attorneys are told
and what they are doing.
But when we have that, of course,
proceedings are suspended and it takes at least two months
for the and usually longer
to get the results and get to the next hearing
where nothing happens.
And they are usually granted
at a very early stage of the proceedings so nothing gets done.
And if they come back and they're competent,
then we are kind of starting from scratch with that
2 to 3 month delay or however long it takes to get the next hearing.
And again, I'm not offering that as an excuse,
but it's an observation and I think it at least partially explains that
you know, why this is so
why we backslid.
Because when we look at the statistics,
it's increased.
It's more than doubled for the district
and more than tripled
for some counties, at least per judge.
Some counties have gone down.
The smaller counties may not.
I may just have one or two or even zero.
So that's
I guess we've identified a possible
contributor to the problem
we're having with getting these cases done
and we're going to try to find some solution.
BCA test results.
I haven't looked at that very closely,
but I'm hoping that that will be
getting better
in the future due to the the funding issues
as well.
So that's that's where we're at.
And as far as time to disposition in many areas, we're doing quite well.
We just haven't been able to resolve the backlog.
And again, that's a next bunch.
So we're going to continue, as I said, with some of these initiatives
to hopefully free up time on judges calendars to work the criminal cases
and then some additional case events, case resolution events
as well.
So that's that's my presentation.
And I think the rule 20 issue is probably
the mental health crisis is enormous, but in the world, 20 issue is something
that I think that's something that we need to look at
and everybody needs to look at as far as how we can do it.
One thing I did consider, and I think it's part of the
something we need to discuss with judges is
we can incrementally shrink that time
between the request and the granting of the order.
If it's, you know, if the affidavit or the representations are there,
shrink the time and maybe shave off a couple of days on the front end
and then deal with the taking action on the report at the back end.
We're looking at the possibility of a district wide real 20 coordinator.
But, you know, that's
that's one thing I can think of that will cut a little bit of time.
Maybe if if judges can, when they get the order, get it out right away.
And and perhaps it's something we can work on there.
But the sheer numbers are just
incredible.
So that's my presentation. Thank you.
Thank you, Judge Anderson, Are other chiefs seeing
that dramatic increase in rule twenties just over the last year or so?
Yes. Yes.
So go ahead, Judge.
Let me just thank you, Jeff.
I should have mentioned this in my presentation.
We have a lot of folks in the Metro that are coming to our county
because we have so many fun activities there in Scott County.
And so we find we have a lot of out of county people.
And what we've discovered on a lot of these rule 20 ones
is that another county has recently done it. 21.
And so we've started doing a search and agreed
and have gotten an agreement from the county attorney
and the public defenders
that if we can access a report that's in the last 6 to 9 months
that we're going to use it from another counties and
and not duplicate these efforts because we're having a terrible time
finding people who even do the evaluations.
So that's delaying us further.
It's it's a huge issue, I think, and we are doing that as well.
Know we've had cases in fact, when we talk about
31.6 cases, that's what's ordered by the judge.
So if we know that there's something in Scott Anoka,
Jason County within our district,
we will get those kinds of agreements and understandings.
And if they're if they're incompetent in Scott County on a case
today, they're going to be incompetent and blue Earth County today as well.
So we're doing the same thing.
So actually, these numbers you talk about for judge
statewide, of course, it's the average result,
but we actually have more cases that are delayed.
There's a pending real 20 in a just for that procedure.
Yeah.
So I don't know if there's
anything
that the I mean, if you have if you have
increased issues with real toes in the first place
similar to what they have in the fifth but the first met it's backlog.
So I mean are there things
you know that you wisdom that you can share
by your experience in the first set notwithstanding the increase in rule 20
is you still met your backlog that the judges in the fifth could
learn. I mean,
those cases did not get resolved and they remain open.
And that's why we have that age to disposition problem,
because we have a bunch of really old cases that are pending along there.
We got rid of the the cheap stuff first again be the cases. Yeah
judge can
it's also the availability of evaluators
so we lost regional services in Dakota but we went out and recruited
we have some dedicated folks that are willing to do it,
but it's tough to get them in.
But with that issue, I've got a case
coming up on a week from tomorrow
and they want to use the evaluation from Hennepin County
for a different charge And regional psych services is saying
we can't testify as to the competency on your case.
And Dakota
at that time,
based on our evaluation nine months ago
or whatever on this guy for this offense at time
separate and distinct and so the
they're saying my supervisor's not going to let me come and testify.
Well, well, that's raises an issue.
And it's not that it's not that far apart from, you know, six, nine months
or something, but they're saying that professionally they can't an opinion
on this case at that time based on that previous evaluation.
So Jeff is reminding me
that there is a statewide examination going on in the council's going to hear.
I don't know, Jeff, if you want, and then I'll go to you.
Just so TAB members have been working with our court services
division to sort of look at this psychological exam issue
and come up with some ideas to bring back to the council.
You remember we went to the legislature last session
and they gave us additional money, but we are certainly don't have enough.
And that was one time money.
So we're going to have to go back and ask for a permanent increase.
We're also hearing from psych examiners who want an increase.
I'm meeting with them, I believe, on Monday, a week
from Monday, to talk about their issues
with pay for contractors, which contributes to all of this.
So we don't have enough of them, then we certainly have a problem.
So we're hoping to bring pretty long
discussion with the Council in November or December to talk about this.
John Johnson and then Judge Byers.
So since we're
talking about the Rule 20, one of the things that I've seen
anecdotally and I will try to
get some data to see if it is throughout our district,
I had a large number of increases in people
that are found to be 21 and then not 24.
So we had people that are found to be incompetent to proceed,
but since they can't be committed, it's
almost impossible to treat to competency and that obviously slows things down.
I don't know if that's a discussion worth
having with a larger group of evaluators.
It creates a lot of complexity.
I've had multiple people then go commit three or four more offenses
during those times, or they're not showing up for court.
They're not in communication with pretrial evaluators
or supervisors and so that really delays things.
And that is something I did not see until that's come up in the last year.
I did not see that before this last year.
And I bet I have four right now,
Judge Byers and then Judge Hennessey.
I wasn't going to talk about this as an initiative.
This actually was Judge Turnout Skills Initiative.
We have a rule 20 prescreening process.
So we contract with a Ph.D.
forensic psychologist.
And before a judge will order this in Duluth anyway,
before a judge orders a rule 21 or 22 or 24, Dr.
Buffington meets with the defendant,
talks to to them, does kind of a prescreening
and makes a determination if a rule 21
is necessary.
And then we get a report back from Dr.
Buffington and issue an order.
And that has been been very helpful.
I mean, there have been times when someone will appear before me
on one day and they're clearly out of their mind
and two days later
they're fine if they're having maybe some sort of
withdrawal from drugs or something like that.
So that's an approach that's been really helpful in the first six.
That's Castro, I'm sure.
Looking at you, does that does the new legislation
and the the board that that's up and running, the navigators and all that,
does that get to Judge Austin's point a little bit or no?
You know, the people who are sort of in between?
Well,
I don't know that it really does.
I guess we'll we'll find out whenever we get forensic navigators
assigned to districts and and see if we can manage and process those cases.
I mean, we lose a lot of those, you know, because they're not comfortable
and they're in they're not in placement in community.
But I mean, that's our hope that it will get get cases.
But it's it's hard to tell. Yeah.
Judge Hennessey just mentioned Judge out said that we have a judge in Stearns
who started a gap court specifically for that purpose,
which has seen some success in moving those cases along.
And if you have any interest in reaching out.
All right.
So let's let's take a 15 minute stretch break
and then we'll come back and and hear from more from Judge Byers on the sixth.
Okay.
Thanks.
In radio time.
Oh, see, poor things just got too much happening here.
All right, We're good and we're on to judge fires.
All right. Thank you, Chief.
Like many of the other districts, we implemented a district
wide remote housing court that's been very successful.
Legal Aid has been able to be at those
initial appearances, we call them case management conferences,
although having presided over a number of those, it's sort of like being
an air traffic controller, putting people in and out of breakout rooms.
But it's it results in a lot of resolution of cases.
So we've been able to then schedule contested hearings within the
statutory timelines.
So we are continuing that initiative.
The other thing, this is a very new initiative,
so I, I can't say what the impact is, but we have a mental health court
and typically mental health courts are for people who have serious
and persistent mental illness, which can be a very high standard.
We have expanded that to include
a behavioral health track that will
accept people who are suffering
from serious mental illness, which are a lot of the people who are gap cases.
So we hope to be able to serve them, who are experiencing
homelessness,
mental health problems,
get them connected with services so that was just
I think they took their first participants within the last couple of weeks.
So I think that that initiative holds, a lot of promise
with respect to
the strategies to meet our our backlog goal,
we're going to hold the course at this point
as of nine
five, our backlog was backlog goal was at 88%.
I think it's dipped a little bit since then.
So we will continue to hold case resolution
events, use senior judges in Duluth, where we are at,
I believe a -113 cases.
We really have developed a good system
with respect to our all, all of our cases
we send out a trial list three or four weeks before the trial.
We have a call date a couple of weeks before the trial.
We've been strictly enforcing the plea cutoff date,
and then we have a meeting on Friday,
Friday mornings to get an update on which cases
have resolved as a result of the call In the plea cut off date
outside of speedy trials, we put the oldest case for all.
This case is first.
And oftentimes those resolve sometimes with dismissals.
I mean, there's a reason that some of these cases get old,
but then that also gives us the opportunity to
reassign judges.
So we're not assigning these cases.
We can reassign judges.
So we're hoping to roll that out to some of the other districts.
Our clearance rate is at 116%.
So we have a we're doing a good job on that.
And we will continue to plug away to meet our backlog goal.
And I'm with Judge Castro.
I hope that after we do, we never hear about it again.
All right.
Thank you.
Judge Hennessey in the seventh engaged.
The seventh has focused on or implemented processes
that I think have helped to improve performance in our district.
Primarily, I think it's been a collaborative approach
to addressing the backlog that has helped us to succeed.
And it's not because we're better collaborators, but our justice partners.
I think we were very lucky to have at a high level
leadership in our justice partner agencies that were very willing to innovate
and to think creatively, to figure out how to calendar better.
And with their
collaboration, we were able to make some changes
and to do some creative calendaring that helped us to meet our backlog goal.
One of the examples of that was the way we did case resolution in Stearns.
Specifically, we looked at cases
that hadn't been filed yet by the county Attorney's office.
They helped us to schedule all of those cases
when they were filed on a case resolution day
so that we could resolve them essentially the day they were filed with
all the justice partners in the room helping them to resolve.
And I think that that made an enormous difference in helping us
keep backlog from growing and also to to clear it.
Second, we implemented a district wide probate team.
We have a group of trained and experienced who have now become subject matter
experts in estates and guardianships and conservatorships,
which has helped us to achieve, I think, district wide consistency
in case and that benefits our customers.
So we're proud of that process.
And then our newest initiative that we're excited
about is the implementation of this Multi-County housing court.
And so many of you have those already.
We are just getting that started now in Stearns and Wadena, and we're hopeful
that that will be successful enough that we can carry that out.
District wide.
At a certain point, we thought we'd better start small in terms of a plan
that we have in place to maintain our our performance.
And having cleared the backlog.
I'm not trying to rub it in, but, you know, we're going to maintaining,
I think, what we need to do.
We still have counties, quite frankly,
that have not cleared their backlog and that are significantly behind.
So, Deb, my court administrator and I are starting
kind of a deep dive into why they're struggling
and how we can help them to also clear the backlog
that they still had and to figure out to diagnose the problem.
And if they do, we know that it's problems that are particular
to the way the justice partners interact with the court in those counties.
And so we're hoping to have more time to drill down and diagnose that problem.
The other thing that we're very hopeful about
is because we have counties that are doing better.
Deb and I have more time to focus on new initiatives as well.
And we can use our time and attention to focus on things.
It's interesting, when Deb and I started two ago on
Judicial Council together, we were both new.
We were just implementing our work plans as part of our strategic plan,
and we'd never seen a work plan looked like or how it was supposed to work and
weren't really
clear, I guess, on what we wanted our goals to be or why.
And now that we had the opportunity very recently on Judicial Council
to report to everyone how we did on our work plan,
It helped us to focus on what we want to do better the next two years.
And so we have we're
excited about implementing
going forward some looking at and diagnosing court
culture in some of our counties that are struggling
to figure out how we can do better for our staff, how we can recruit people
who will want to come and stay and work in our court administration offices.
So we're going to look at court culture in some of the struggling counties,
and we're also going to try to concentrate more on diversity, equity and inclusion.
And we have a consultant coming in to help us with that.
So we're looking forward to having a little more time to doing
so, too, focusing on new initiatives.
Thank you.
Any questions for the seventh,
right?
Judge Beckman.
Thank you.
So in terms of practices implemented,
we also implemented a district wide housing court legal aid approach
to our district after the moratorium said, hey, we like the way you do this.
What if we considered doing it on a district wide concept continuation?
And so we worked and partnered with them to do that.
It's been extremely successful.
We're pulling the statistics.
We are at a one year pilot in our district right now.
We just passed the one year mark at the end of August.
The vast majority of cases at the initial hearing are settling.
Those that don't settle and are set for trial,
a high percentage of those are also resolving at trial
and then very few are
being tried. I don't have those stats today.
I'll say that it's I'm getting
a lot of feedback that
the litigants
are appearing because it's remote only.
So we think that the statistics will show that the appearance rates
are much higher than they were before
we implemented the district wide housing court
and that the involvement of the litigation is much higher now that legal aid
is there to at minimum advise at that first appearance.
So one judge's handling that happens to be me
because I couldn't get any takers when I started to implement this.
So but now that it's
and now that it's it's
been going well, I'm hoping that we can pass this on.
At any rate, that's been the newest initiative that had success
in our district also are part of the Flex court.
And initially there was a lot of hesitation about that.
I think court staff were concerned about what that would look like.
It's gone very well in Meeker County.
The litigants seem to appreciate it.
There have been some learning curves, however,
we're just learning how to adapt in a climate
where people are making a decision how they want to appear, as
are the attorneys, so that initiative has been
new in the last, I guess, year and a half.
And so we're not quite sure.
We're learning how to navigate that.
I think that that's been a really good concept for our county.
We implemented changes on a county wide basis
instead of area wide basis to tackle our backlog.
And we met the backlog.
Some of the things that we did in order to do that is we looked at why
jury trials were so heavy in certain areas and what we could do to help
try and settle cases.
We met with specific partners, we met with specific judges.
We asked what their needs were.
We tried to listen to what those needs were, and then we catered
our practices in the counties to try and assist,
including dedicating resources that were needed to do that.
And I think that that change that we did helped us meet the backlog
in terms of how we're going to maintain that.
We're going to continue to keep the built in settlement
conference days that we're required people to show up.
The attorneys come prepared.
There is a certain expectation on them.
So it's almost like the stand down days.
It's like a modification of a stand down day that's still built into the calendars
in most of our counties.
And so that's still a requirement.
We also are requiring in juvenile delinquency
is that the initial appearances?
It's not just delinquencies,
actually, it's all juveniles that the initial appearances are in person
because most of them can resolve that day.
There was a district wide order partnering with
the public defender's office that the delinquencies
we all have representation at delinquency appearance. So
we hunt down the
applications and do the orders, but the public defenders will appear for them.
So The administrative part still has to get accomplished,
but will be representation when the individuals appear.
So we think that'll help maintain status quo as well.
And last, we've been concentrating on taking care of folks.
We heard what they had to say, that the backlog really took a toll.
So we've done some to help with that, including some
assignment area training coming this fall with judges
and court staff teams to help them better communicate and work together.
Judges did this trainings
to learn how to communicate better amongst themselves and with their staff.
That was successful.
We're going to implement that in the fall, training with staff,
and then
we're doing a day of recognition for all of our partners
and our court staff from the eighth District administration
just to say thank you for all your hard work on the backlog.
That's my report.
Any questions or comments for the eight?
All right, Thank you, Judge Beckman, Judge Austin.
But like several other districts, the ninth District, in terms
of its new initiative, focused on doing a district wide, remote hearing process.
And we partnered with Northwest and northeastern
Minnesota Legal Services to do that.
One of the big takeaways
that I'm hearing from other people, but that also showed up in this,
we had lawyers at every one of the eviction hearings,
and that's what makes the difference
in terms of resolving the cases in our district.
We have our referees hearing these cases and they are reporting
5 to 80% settlement rates at the initial hearing.
I think it is worth really recognizing how much legal services
has showed up in this process, because at these hearings, the lawyers
are talking to people even when they don't technically financially qualify.
So there's a real education process that's going on not only for people
that may be dealing with the evictions or tenants, but also for landlords.
And I'm sure it also keeps the referees just at the
at the top of their knowledge game as well.
In this particular area.
Overall, I think we're at war.
We're beyond clearance rates.
So certainly more than what are being filed.
But that settlement rate also had another positive,
I think, collateral impact, and that's the
they're also taking care of Expungements at that same hearing.
So there's not a separate one.
There's also been resolutions of some harassment, restraining orders
and things like that.
So you have people that are able to not only resolve the issues
that have been raised, but anticipate other ones and move people forward.
So when you think about access to justice, not only taking care of a case,
a dispute, but doing it in a way that has people leaving
feeling like there was truly a fair resolution, they got heard,
their problem got sorted out
and they were talking to people that knew what they were doing.
I was very functional.
Then.
With respect to backlog strategies, the ninth District has kind of stayed
right in the middle pretty consistently of the districts that have not resolved
were an 85% clearance rate at 13 of our 17
counties hit that a clearance rate
or backlog reduction within the year that the court originally said.
We have four counties that are not.
Those four counties really have
specific issues to each of the counties.
So there isn't an overall program
that is or idea that is going to solve that.
I think that the judges in each of those counties are working on it.
And it's really the challenge is to monitor that regularly,
talk about it in a way that isn't an irritant or a distraction
to the people that are trying to work through it.
But the progress has been steady and I that that is the main thing to
to report.
We're using the temporary referees.
They have staff.
We have the senior judge coverage.
We've really asked we did focus on those four counties to say
what are the resources
that you think are going to put you in the best position to move through this?
And I think we're starting to open up to this idea.
Maybe the district takes care of the backlog entirely
and not just focus on the counties that have not made it
to see if we can make more progress that way and share it.
Initially, I think there was some resistance
to case resolution events that they were fairly successful.
So we'll have a discussion about having those again,
I that is the report
from the 19 questions or comments from the ninth.
The only thing that I was reminded I wanted to mention this earlier,
and it's my mind.
So the court is in the middle of a pilot involving
license per hour, involving paralegals, paraprofessionals
who are allowed to appear in housing court and represent clients.
And so particularly, I mean, a number of the chiefs
have talked about the housing court initiatives in your district.
So if you haven't thought about welcoming
paraprofessionals, I encourage you to do that.
Familiarize yourself with the courts.
Pilot I know Legal Legal Services is using paralegals in this
with paraprofessionals in this way.
So that might be an option for you in your districts as well.
Judge Hill Yes, in the 10th,
right. Thank you, Chief.
You know, I'll recognize upfront at least we're starting kind of
with the backlog discussion that Judge Hennessey look directly at me when she
talked about clearing her backlog.
And, you know, quite
right.
No, no.
All in good humor.
Just just just so everyone who's not here knows, Judge
Hennessey and I get along great. So
but, you know, I think, you know, to recognize
just bluntly that in the 10th, we own half the state's backlog.
And, you know, that has been a struggle.
But, you know, the good in all of that is that in the last month,
our clearance rate in the 10th District was 137%.
And so progress is being made.
Let me start of with the initiatives and I'll kind of echo
some of the comments made by the other chiefs
of a very successful centralized housing court program.
Anoka always had a very successful housing court program
with a lot of wraparound services,
and once we centralize that made it remote, it gave us the ability
to bring those services district wide, even into the small counties.
And we're using temporary referees at this point to do that.
And that's been a really successful program.
It also keeps,
you know, when when you don't have an agreement
or a resolution at the initial appearance in housing court,
it keeps that trial off of a judge's
calendar within ten days, because oftentimes finding
time for a housing court trial is nearly impossible
in some of the smaller counties and even the larger ones when those timelines
kick in and God forbid that anyone would actually request a jury trial
in an eviction case, because we're not sure how you know, that always
that always creates issues.
Everyone panics.
And so that's been very successful.
Of course, the concern is we're using temporary referees.
We're going to start evaluating in October or at October bench meeting.
You know what happens when our temporary funding ceases at the end of this
fiscal year, How we might maintain that, Can we internally fund
is there a different way of looking at that?
We do the same that that program was very successful.
We've done the same with Conciliation court
in the counties, the four smaller counties in the district.
We've partnered with Dorsey, who provides attorneys as conciliation referee.
That's been very successful, you know, with their young attorneys.
Well, it started with their young attorneys
and then even some of their more seasoned attorneys wanted in on the action
to become referees.
And so that's been very successful.
And we
also have a district wide conciliation court calendar that covers
the conflict cases because Dorsey can't handle everything,
but they do a little more than half of those cases.
And then conciliation court for the rest of the district is centralized
again with temporary referee resources that will reevaluate evaluating
in October.
And so then lastly, you know, we use one other temporary referee kind of on
an ad hoc basis across the county, across various counties, all the counties
who kind of get to choose how to use that referee time.
You're recognizing that we have half the state's
backlog and four of our counties have cleared the backlog.
But for having the two the two smallest counties
that have not cleared their backlog last week reached reach single.
So it was very close.
And the difficult part of that is when you do a case resolution event
and you get down to five cases, it's almost heartbreaking that you didn't get
below zero
because then, of course, the following week,
the county attorneys files a bunch of new complaints.
And so but they're very close,
and I think they'll get there very at this point.
You know, the
largest county, Anoka County, has made some drastic changes recently.
The bench has made some very hard decisions that have changed
the way they're doing some things there.
You know, we took the lead kind of
from some of the other counties that have had success.
We also had a lot of success in Washington County where we recognize that,
you know, in counties that are struggling, you kind of have to have a heavy
on the judicial side.
In Washington County, there was one judge kind of took it upon herself to make sure
that cases got resolved and, you know, became that kind of heavy in Anoka County.
Now, there's a team of six judges handling
all felony cases that just started about a month ago.
And, you know, that way
you don't get the judge shopping between judges and playing with calendars
when the attorneys can decide kind of when a case goes to trial
within the coloring system amongst 16 judges,
they also have six on a misdemeanor gross misdemeanor side of the term
to also keep up in those case types.
Anoka County is also at least now considering
some type of hearing officer in minor criminal program.
Sarah has been working with Anoka County in evaluating that
and whether that might be successful in saving more time
for felonies and gross misdemeanors to clear that backlog.
So I think we're optimistic at this point
that there's been progress being being made.
I think once those calendars settle in and those six judges get to work
and there actually is now some competition between the felony side
and the misdemeanor side about who's going to clear first.
You know,
I think there's positive news there that we're going to get through that.
So, you know, hopefully sometime soon
after the new year, then Judge Hennessey won't have to stare at me anymore
for that right.
So, so
so, Judge, I think Chief, I think that's my report.
I don't have much more to add than, you know,
similar comments about the difficulty we're having.
Rule 20 evaluations of mental health issues is an ongoing issue
that we're evaluating, trying to be better and more efficient and effective
in in dealing with with people
appearing before us with mental health issues.
You judge he'll use any questions
or comments for the 10th.
All right,
Justice Anderson, what do you got from the Supreme Court?
So the news here is
we know
you're experiencing some of the number of
cases that were
expected afternoon.
I know that you
thought
we expected that to be the case, and I expect that
those numbers will tick up as well.
Are averages for submission to circulation
and disposition remain about the same, maybe a little bit better?
We you know, I'd like to say we have some hyper sophisticated,
inventive, creative, progressive new program
that leads to better results like the various districts have been reporting.
In our case, it's sort of retrograde in the sense
that the chief justice takes the computer printout and drops
by, for example, my office and says, When can we expect?
And so we have conversations like that, which actually seems to work pretty well.
It does seem to produce results.
But that's the that's the method that that the fourth floor uses to
to get to get cases moving.
We we continue to have a perfect mark in disposing of termination of parole right
APF hours
and we have added within our budget
in the course of the last year a part time assistant commissioner
who has been immensely helpful, actually came to us from
another state living in here in Minnesota now
and has been really helpful in on the PSR front.
So I think I think things are moving in the right direction.
And I will say generally anytime we have turnover on the court
in the course of my know, almost 20 years,
that is a great opportunity to really put the heat on members to produce,
to to produce opinions and to produce them as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, we're going to have some turnover as you've been reading.
So we'll do we'll do the best we can.
And I think, like I said, things have gone reasonably well.
Thank you, Justice Anderson.
Judge, are you going to report for the Court
of Appeals on your at your very first meeting?
Wow, Good on you. Lucky me.
Thank you, Chief.
In her absence, Chief Judge Segal asked me to deliver
the Performance Measures report for the Court of Appeals.
And we are pleased to report that the court disposed of
97% of all cases within one year of filing.
That is far above the ABA standard of 90% clearance rate during that time period.
And I think this might be the first time ever that
the Court of Appeals has met the criminal
clearance rate standard.
So I think that that is we've we've historically had problems meeting
that standard because of our internal timing for delivery of transcripts.
But all of the court reporters in the various districts
have been excellent at getting their transcripts in in a very
timely manner, which has enabled us to meet our clearance rates.
So we want to extend our gratitude to the district courts for your hard work,
to the court reporters in for meeting those meeting those deadlines.
I will note that our caseload has picked up
quite a bit, and that is because of all of your hard work and
clearing your backlogs.
So we can expect our numbers to be far greater next year
and hopefully we will continue on this good of meeting our clearance rates.
Thank you, Judge Fritz.
So I just appreciate all the reports
and all the good work that's going on across the state.
You know, we do these reports twice a year here at the council so that we can try
to hold each other accountable to the measures that the Council,
but also so that we can learn from each other and hear
about innovations in District X that we can maybe import to our district
to get to see if we can, you know, make improvements for the people we serve.
So it's a really important part
of the work of the Council to engage in
what some might think is a little tedious conversation.
I'll this is the part I'll miss.
I mean, I really enjoy hearing about all the innovations
that you all have underway around the state of Minnesota.
So, so well done.
And, you know, maybe I'll listen in in March when you give your oral reports.
And then again, maybe you.
Yeah, send me a zoom in my invite.
Okay, Let's move on. Anything else?
If you want anything else on. Okay, let's move on.
Thank you, Jennifer. She could. She's gone.
She's here. Okay, good. Thank you. Jennifer.
Number five
has to do with collection of data in.
Jami is here to talk to us about this.
This involves conservatorship and guardianship cases.
Jamie.
And you have a buddy with you.
I do, buddy.
Heather Sherman, her
try and share my screen.
I'm sorry, everyone.
My laptop died this morning
operating on a new one with no favorites or any of that great stuff.
So of course, I'm locked out and you're locked out.
All right.
I do a
slideshow. I know what's on the screen.
I guess that doesn't matter.
I was just going to go to slide show, but I can't even
read all.
Jeff is helping me.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, right.
That's.
That is bad. I not.
All right.
Good morning. Thank you, everyone.
I did bring Heather Sherman here with me today.
Heather is my co-lead on this project.
EPI 312 advanced of Minnesota Vulnerable Adult Care.
And I want to give you just
a little bit of background also as we dig into this topic.
So outline an objective for today.
We'll cover the project background and our grand goals.
And then why do we want to collect this data?
Race, ethnicity and then the primary language and then will be the objective.
Today is the reasons why we would like to collect this data
and then looking for a decision from counsel.
Oh, the goal of the project is
the advancement of Minnesota Vulnerable Don't Care Project is to ensure
that the people subject to guardianship and conservator ship and in Minnesota
are adequately protected and well cared for.
And this is a grant funded project.
We received grant funds September of 21.
So I have to read this little blurb at the bottom to you.
It's mandatory by our grant funder.
This work is supported in part by grant number
90ejig00190100.
You think I'd have that memorized by now?
I say it all the time, but I do not.
Elder justice Innovative grants awarded in 2021 for improving guardianship
and conservatorship
from the Administrative Administration of Community Living and U.S.
Department of Health and Human.
So like
I said, this was a grant funded project
and there was a number of goals and wonderful things
we wanted to do with this funding, just to name a few.
We implemented a complaint process for guardians and conservators.
If they're not acting the best interest of the person,
people can contact us and complain about that.
And we have an investigative process also enhancing
and doing development to our embassy and AMG systems
just to again help further our monitoring,
looking for fraud, exploitation and better protecting our people of Minnesota,
conducting some training of of decision making.
So interested parties, guardians, conservators,
social workers, court visitors, judicial officers.
So the training has been has been well received.
And then also why we're here today, which is objective three
to create the capacity to document and track information by better utilizing
and enhancing necessary electronic record systems,
our AMG and our AMG embassy systems.
So we have a number of tasks and are under this objective,
but we're just highlighting the main tasks affect today.
So the to enhance the ability to collect and report on various data
elements for both guardianship and conservatorship cases.
We're looking to include more information from the petition.
We we find as we look at these cases,
there's a lot of information we like to call stuck in the petition.
And so we'll be looking to gather more of that information in a better way
so that we can utilize it for reporting and making these case types better.
The ability AMC and AMG
Ormond says, to add demographic information
and then also determine any issues
or who might be unrepresented in this area.
So this is just
some national statistics that we thought we would share that white respondents
are significantly more likely to have guardianship.
Black respondents are significantly more likely to have a public guardian
or public administrator as a guardian, and then Hispanic respondents
are significantly more likely to have a family member as a guardian
in the percentages or or on the screen
primary language data.
We'd like to collect this data in our guardianship and conservatorship cases.
We would use this data to determine need for resources,
additional communications that we might need or additional court
forms and instructions that we could better serve our customers.
Why do we
want to collect race and ethnicity data in this area?
Are the courts want to collect it for for many reasons,
including to inform policy decisions and measure court performance,
especially in our area of timeless timeliness and access to fairness.
There's a number of organizations tions
that support this collection of data.
The Court Statistics Project, SGI
and the National Center and Casca.
Why do we care that they support these efforts?
We have received grant funding in the past from SGI
as well as we participate projects with the National Center in Costa.
Heather and I had an opportunity to participate
in a monitoring monitoring project last year where we assisted in developing
monitoring tools and instructions for other states
that don't have programs as robust as what Minnesota does.
So just a few examples.
So then also the project team
believes that collecting this data will help us identify issues for access.
Access, fairness, understanding
who is really under guardianship and how can we better serve them.
Collecting the data will allow us to evaluate racial disparities
as to guide, discussion and equity work.
It will help us, you know, who has access to court appointed attorneys
who may not access to court visitors or who may not
Are the use of less restrictive options being used
with the different demographics.
But that also is now a mandatory requirement in statute.
And then just the trends in theft and fraud
and then also any interesting outcomes that we look at
when it comes to personal being reports and the guardians in that area.
So we're looking for a decision from judicial counsel.
If you agree with this approach to collecting additional data
and the primary language in this area,
and if if the Council agrees, how will this information be collected?
Are you going to ask how are you going to is a great question
that I was looking at my notes and like I reiterate over that and I apologize.
So how will we collect this data?
We would look at potentially collecting it while people in the hearings
and we would collect it in court, We could collect it at the counter.
We could also ask that they do it in the court visitors report.
And when the visitors are visiting the respondents or also self reporting,
we'd like to maybe add an enhancement to MSI or AMG
where the guardians and conservators could add it right there.
It would be self-reported.
We're not asking that it would be a mandatory field or required field.
And then also,
if we were to get a data request, would obviously go through
all of the correct channels with our CIO office and legal to ensure
that we're providing the correct data information that would go out.
We would ensure that it's public
and that it would not be directly correlated to any direct person.
Hey, any other questions adjusted with the categories
you are collecting on be limited to white, black and Hispanic?
No, we were looking at just broader areas.
We would collect any demographic information that we can collect.
I believe it would probably be
the same as what we collect now for chips in criminal.
Other questions.
Sarah
So we were talking about collecting race data earlier
in our meeting and how we're struggling with collecting it.
So is this something that we should wrap into the check in process
so that we can actually collect enough data?
I'm a little bit concerned about adding to the courtroom and
counter work right now,
so just
wondering if this is something that could be added to each chicken.
I think so.
Unless we decide to go the route of having the court visitor get the information.
So they haven't even come to court yet, that's a possibility too.
But yeah, I agree.
If we do decide it's going to be before the hearing at the hearing,
it would make sense for it to be in the check in process
since.
So the decision item for the Council is whether the Council agrees
that the branch can collect race, ethnicity and primary language
data from guardianship and conservatorship cases.
Is there any objection to acting on this today?
Any objection to acting on this today?
All right, then
I'll take a motion to approve of the collection of the data.
And it's
been moved and seconded that the council agrees
that the branch can begin collecting this matter discussion on the motion
discussion. On the motion.
All those in favor signify by saying I,
i, I opposed.
All right, Motion carries.
Thank you so much, you mother and Jamie.
You're here for the next item as well.
The statewide court records audit.
Yes. I'm going to make this a little larger for everyone.
So in your materials, you should have this overview document
of the audit business for any new members.
This is what I provide when we conduct an audit,
just kind of this high level overview.
And then also you should have a copy of the full audit
with the response as well.
The the statewide storage of court records audit.
This was asked to be conducted by the Council.
We had conducted an audit in the 10th District
and we had added this as a program item and there was some findings in that area
and then also with the the IFP pilot that with court reporters
there was some issues that were noted in that area as well.
So the council asked that this audit be connected.
So just have a little reminder.
So bringing this to the group to go over the findings and recommendations.
So the audit scope was December one,
21 to December one, 22 and the different areas.
But we looked at our audio paper,
all the dictionaries that are uploaded,
the naming conventions, Ron translated notes, back up
recordings, redundant storage, and then also district monitoring
to determine the objective was to determine
if the branch internal control structure is adequate to.
Ensure that the branch safeguarded excerpts, produce reliable data
and complied with related laws and policies.
The overall conclusion is that the branch internal controls were not adequate
to ensure that we safeguarded assets, produced reliable information
and complied with legal requirements and judicial policy.
The report contains seven findings
and no written observations in this report.
The findings are considered a major weakness in internal controls,
so I'm going to cover each finding.
Please feel free to stop me as we go.
If you have issues.
It was a fairly lengthy report.
So finally, number one is in stenographic records
and this is the policy states that stenographic records
need to be in the repository and the repository is called on this.
So you may hear me use that term throughout the presentation
So in our auditing sample, there was 23% of our samples
that were missing stenographic records from on this.
Some court reporters
did note that they had a substitute court reporter.
They included like a no filing note
and was something that was really helpful, we feel, to the auditors
and to any, you know, court administration or district administration
that might be looking for these records if they need be.
So we're thinking that
that could be a policy change that we could have that added.
So that
sometimes means this doesn't
always reflect the proper reporter in Memphis.
So having the court reporter note, that would be really helpful.
And then also in this finding, there was 14 cases that were not found.
The standard graphic records
MENSAH stated that the record it was held on the record.
However, after further review
was not supposed to be noted in MENSA sources held on the record.
So this is a court administration issue
that needs to be addressed.
Finding number two is in audio and backup recordings.
So in our testing and sampling, there was 9% of audio
and backups that were not found in the repository on this.
We also found some instances where they uploaded court reporters
uploaded videos, which is not recommended by best practices.
Again, another thing that we item that we would like addressed
in the policy that those items are too large.
They shouldn't be uploaded into that repository.
So we're thinking it should be addressed in the policy.
The auditors observed that most court reporters
label the files when they're using their audios, uploading
with just the session date and maybe a courtroom number.
And as you can imagine, sometimes they have multiple audios on a given day.
We did not up to 18 instances in a given day.
So this makes it difficult to locate what audio you're specifically looking for.
So we also recommend that this be addressed in the policy
that maybe we have some naming convention standards addressed in this area.
It'll just allow for better location of these files.
We also had court reporters that
we'd seen anywhere is up to 29 files
loaded with in a single day with the exact same naming conventions.
So again, just hard to locate those those files.
And then same issue.
As noted before, we had 18 cases that were not found in OnBase and
it was stated it was held on the record, but It shouldn't have been.
So again, I'm just looking to have some training with court administration
on when those should be properly noted instances on the record or off the record
finding three log notes and tags.
So audio recordings need to be logged and tagged by the court
recorder and in 22% of our sample,
they were missing tagging and logging of these files.
We did note that quite a few of these issues did.
They were in Zoom recordings where we were missing
those logs and tags.
The policy also was changed during the pandemic to.
Allow court reporters to use their own devices,
and we recommend that that be changed back, that they they move away from using
those those devices, their own devices, and use court
approved devices that will also help with the logging and tagging issue.
Some districts, journals where logging and tagging.
Also at the same time, they were taking the record.
And this wasn't clear in the policy whether that's required or not.
So again, a recommendation to just clarify
that in the policy, if that's expected of our standards or not.
In the third District, they
were logging and tagging, but however it was only going to the redundant storage
and it wasn't in on bass or in the repository.
So we see that seems to be maybe a system issue that we need
to talk to I.T about
the forests in the eighth district.
They're audio recordings.
They have date time stamp on their case numbers, appearances.
Speaker id, unique terms phrases.
This practice just really provides a good opportunity
for easily identifying which hearing or,
you know, case that you're looking for if a transcript is needed.
So we think that this should be incorporated in all districts if possible.
So again, in a policy area, best practices start
really logging and tagging in great detail.
Finding number four is redundant
copies and audio recordings, so a redundant copy
must be kept in a separate location, separate from OnBase.
In our
testing there was instances where the redundant copies of audio
recordings were not found in a second location 28% of the time.
So we don't truly know if this was i.t issue
district issue, court reporter issue.
But just doing some further digging to resolves
that redundant storage problem.
Finding five is I'm
sorry, can I ask a question about that redundant storage?
So isn't the audio recording the redundant copy of a
of a standard reporter's notes.
Right. So that's the main right.
And then the, the audio is the redundant copy
and I'm going to
come up here
is the like.
So I brought an editor with me if we have any detailed questions
and she can assist with
and legal
is going to if they have any policy questions as well today.
All right.
So the audio recording is the backup, but it's uploaded in OnBase.
So the reasoning behind why the policy requires for
the audio recordings to be
stored in a redundant is in case something happens to OnBase.
Then we lose the audio in OnBase.
So having it in a redundant like in a separate folder
would help if that happens. Makes sense.
So we're doing we're asking the reporter
to upload even though Liberty is uploading that
they're supposed to upload a redundant audio copy.
Right. So there's an automated gap.
Another one.
Yeah. There's an automated process that does, that.
So it's not the individual. Right.
Okay. Sorry.
So we're instances where that wasn't happening
and you weren't seeing it in a separate folder here.
Okay, No problem.
Stay here
later for.
All right.
Filing five, filing of stenographic notes and our request recording.
So in 20 instances of our streaming demographic notes
and audio recordings were not properly filed in the appropriate counties
when taking notes and recording in multiple counties in a specific day.
So policy states that the recording needs to be recorded in the venue,
that it was taken.
And in 24% of instances we had to look into multiple different
venues to find the particular case that the auditors were looking for.
So they either need to be noted that they're in the other county so that you're
easily can locate it or needs to be located in both counties in OnBase.
And then in two, four and six
audio recordings and tag list captured using the audio recording system, Court
Smart were not properly transferring to the repository.
Each file is transferred into multiple files of ten minute
increments or less, and then these files were not properly later labeled.
So Again, this is a system issue recommending that we work
with Court smart and i.t to fix that problem.
There is a monitoring requirement also by the districts are supposed
to be monitoring to ensure
that these files are properly loaded, that they're loaded timely.
This was taking place differently.
This is more of just letting the council know the districts know
that some are monitoring monthly, quarterly, weekly,
some are documenting are not documenting, which made it hard for us to verify
whether we're complying with our court record management plan.
So just noting that as well.
And then also OnBase
is not super user friendly when it comes to monitoring.
So we recommend that access be broadened
to the people that are going to be conducting those reviews
when the districts are caught, administration
would conduct their reviews. It was only like a number of files
that was uploaded, which we think is helpful.
They should be able to open the files, look at the files
to ensure that they're not corrupt, that they're opening, that they're not blank.
Those kinds of things.
Finding six is late submission.
So the auditors conduct an analysis of
the date that it was submitted.
Records are supposed to be submitted either end of day
or within five business days and stencils.
In our sampling, 24% relate on average up to 22 days later.
And then audio is where 11% late as well.
This also, though, could be associated to some of system glitches
for the the audios and then finding seven is filing format analysis.
We did an analysis of the system for just formats of these files
that are uploaded and we found that there was dental records
that were uploaded in not approved formats which then allowed them to not open
or when they were opened, they were blank files, audio records.
The policy states that they must be on a branch owned device.
Again the pandemic section that needs to be changed in the policy
that to make sure that we're only recording on branch devices and
also maybe in the policy addressing
specific formats that we will only accept or that we're looking for.
And it also found some instances of standard records
that were not categorized correctly.
So it was a standard record, but it was uploaded as audio or video
and then translated notes under Runnels,
and then audio was filed under wrong session date.
And again, if districts are using liberty, this was a system glitch
i.t is working through so
so just introduce us to your honor.
This is my auditor, Abiola opara.
She's been with the branch seven years.
Thank you for your work, Abbie. Thank you.
So this is obviously, you know,
protecting the record is critical to what we do.
This is a very significant audit in terms of the number of findings.
So do you feel as though the response that you got,
Jamie, from administration is sufficient to address all of these issues?
Yes, I Do I think that they're taking a strong approach?
I like to think there was a few judges that participated in assisting
with the response, and I really appreciate that from the appointing authority
standpoint and knowing that we can get these changes made and addressed.
And Jeff, do you want to talk about how do we just in terms of next steps
here?
Well, we for audits of this size and magnitude
and with this many findings,
because the council serves as the audit committee for the branch,
we would normally come back to you as the audit committee to give you
an update on whether compliance has been done with the audit
based on the letter I sent in as to what we're going to do.
This one is going to take some it changes policy changes, some analysis by legal.
So I guess I would suggest that possibly and Jamie can tell me if I'm way off
base here, but possibly in the summer of 24, we would come back
and let the council know whether we think we have done
all we need to do with regard to this audit.
That seems like a plan to me.
I mean, we want to make sure that we're getting after this because
it's really
it's significant in terms of our ability to do justice.
But also it's significant in terms of, as you know, the number of findings here.
So, Judge, is.
Thank you, Jamie.
The I mean, I do think the report is significant.
I mean, obviously,
we need to make sure that we have these records if they're needed for future
use by either the court of appeals or the district courts or anyone else.
A participant may want a transcript.
And I know it comes as a follow up to the 10th District audit
where we've made some changes,
and I think some of those got incorporated into some recommendations.
But I'm curious, you know, we have we have a we have a policy issue.
We have staffing issues which ultimately
become judicial responsibility.
Then we have, you know, just some staffing issues and technology issues.
What I'm hearing is at some point the state court administration
is likely to come back to judicial council with some policy change recommendations.
And we all have court record policies internally in each district.
I'm just wondering, we started looking at our court record policy
in the 10th District, but we're not we haven't formalized the changes yet.
And I'm wondering if we shouldn't be waiting until we get the policy changes
approved at Judicial Council
before we move on to the district level, changes to our policies.
Yeah, I
participated on the administrative side in terms of working on the response.
We think that it would be helpful to have the policy changes in place first
so that you know what those are and it can inform
how those local plans have to be adjusted.
Some of you may be aware, you know, Deb, police in legal
counsel is our resident expert on all matters, court reporter.
And Deb
will not be here forever.
So our goal here is to have Deb come to council November
with some recommended policy changes so that council can have that discussion
and hopefully we can get a decision quickly so that we can forward those,
so the districts can work with those changes on their local plans.
And then additional follow up in the summer.
Correct.
And, you know, as Jamie indicated, are some changes we need to make from an I.T.
perspective.
And I know folks are looking at those and doing what they can,
but that may also be something that takes a little bit of time to resolve.
But we really want to get those policy changes moving.
And I know Dutt's working on them now, so.
Okay.
Other questions.
Judge Leinen, thank you.
I would I would like to see us get some input from
court reporters about some of these very specific issues from both Stefanos
and Urs how from a practical standpoint, their difficulty in compliance,
because I think some of the stuff I don't quite understand until I talk
to the individual reporter, it says, well, this is actually what happens.
So I'd like to see us include a couple of reporters in this analysis.
So we're making changes that make sense for them.
Well, we should probably talk to the admin team.
I'm assuming that we've been consulting as we've been putting the response
together, but we should try to see if we're going to have some form right?
I mean, part of this is an audit of the port management
plan we already approved as a council, so we're not recommending changing plan.
And I think your question
is, do they one of the points was training.
Do they know what they're supposed to do?
Some of this? Was it glitches, as you heard?
So they probably thought they were doing what they're supposed to be doing,
but it wasn't going to the right place.
So I don't in any way want to say this is all port reporters doing something wrong.
I think there's a lot of things
with the next steps with that management plan we need to look at.
And I think your point is a good one.
Hey, anything else on this?
All right.
Thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Abby.
Is everybody okay to keep going?
We have a few things here,
but I don't think anything else is going to take too terribly long.
And then we can have lunch.
Number seven is a discussion item.
Judge Greg Anderson, who chairs the H.R.
committee is going to give us an update on law clerk salaries, I think.
Right.
Judge Anderson, there's the person was
reading out
and are you on using the mic?
Right.
So the purpose is to support everybody about the law
clerk fee scale and then look at next steps.
I'd like.
Okay.
I also notice how I can do that.
Just one. Okay.
All right. Abella
all right.
So that's a follow up
to the Old Testament.
All right, all right, all right, all right.
So this is just a recap of the law clerk pay scale implementation
and then to talk about the next steps.
So the next slide,
this is a ago.
So there's a 15% increase in the law clerk
salary average increase, 9%
was the allocated pool for all other staff in the organization except for judges.
But that's a separate item.
And the raise range for law clerks was from 13% to 29.1%.
So that's the statewide
average increase and the high in the law.
So the minimum
was 13%.
You can see here that we had
the placement divided into quartiles.
73% of the law clerks have been replaced
above $68,479,
which is the lower end of the second quartile.
59% were in the second quartile
or in the third quarter aisle and five in the
or 10% in the fourth quartile.
There were also 100 requests for service credit.
And this was after the initial placement.
Looking at their years of service,
some 75% of those resulted in a higher pay
and 25% resulted in additional years credit
but didn't result in higher pay.
And overall, the low end was the 65,217,
ranging up to 76,400 placement
for law clerks.
And we can see here it's early in the
it's early to look at this, but since January
I'm sorry, July 1st of this year, there have been 37 new hires.
And you can see the placement in the quartiles.
92% were in first quartile
and then only five in the second
5% in the second and 3% in the fourth.
And again, there's the placement range
for new hires.
As far as have we had new
or see more applicants, it's early, but branch wide.
We're seeing an uptick in applications per posting in the last few months.
And this is
important because as the new law clerk salary
starting salary matrix, again, you can see
the quartiles that we've developed
and the criteria for each of those.
So what we were trying to do is show the
we had the goals of equity across the branch and transparency.
Judges can utilize this chart and then consult with their local h.R.
For the entry salaries of new law clerks
based on these criteria.
So that's the matrix.
New hires
and they will be on there.
And i want to pay for performance as far as future
placement.
I'm sorry, the future salaries.
We do this for several reasons,
but we want to incentivize performance
and we want to promote
equitable performance management
so its future salaries are going to be based on
how well a law clerk is performing on their jobs.
And we will need to perform
or complete performance evaluations each year.
This is not a new thing.
Many other employees have the same model
and that
will lead to retention of current employees.
All right.
Looking at what's next, pay for performance, pay for performance.
So I'm sorry.
So we'll have the performance review form.
They'll have five competencies.
There will be a rating for each.
Each is assigned a value
and it will be a maximum
score, maximum score of 15
and lowest is five.
And you will be getting more information on this
in the coming months so you can do your evaluations.
Looking ahead, we will be monitoring the application
data retention rates and then the marriage scores.
And I think we'll be reporting back some time in the future
because this is important, obviously, to all of us.
And we want to know how the implementation of the scale
and the criteria for advancement is working.
So if there are any questions, I'll try to answer them.
Dana's is here as well. Yeah.
So. Okay, Any questions?
Really interesting information.
Great to see.
No questions.
All right.
Thank you, judge anderson and h.r. You committee.
Thanks, dana, for all that good work.
And if you want more detailed information by your district, of course
you can talk to your district. h.R.
People about it.
Number eight
is the branch's financial closing report for the biennium.
And our favorite finance director is here to give us that report.
Welcome Dan new
year, share my screen here.
Okay.
You probably want to follow along with yours
because a lot of the reports itself are very small.
I just have few comments.
First, before we get started on the presentation,
you know, this is the chief justice's last
financial update for the branch So bring in the marching band.
Some of you looked when I did that.
No one else can.
I did.
I had part of the marching band that was part of being sworn in as a Is that right?
Yeah. Wow. Nice.
Yeah, well, we didn't have the money for it this time.
Sorry.
So here.
So I'm sure you're thrilled.
You going to have to listen to this
to listen to me and this boring report from here on out.
But you know, in all seriousness, about eight years ago, the
the chief made it quite clear to me the importance of utilizing every dollar
within the branch's budget.
I think your statement was
and this is eight years ago, so I don't hardly remember yesterday,
but you said we cover the whole state of Minnesota with a fairly modest portion
of the state's budget.
That's true.
It's just a little over 1%.
So it was pretty clear.
So when I communicated the chief justice's expectations to the financial employees
throughout the branch, they appreciated your direction and took it to heart.
So today is a mike drop
kind of day for financial employees across the state.
Really is.
The branch effectively utilized its funding with fantastic
financial planning, great communications, and made sound in ways
investments that will benefit the branch now and into the future.
I want to be clear about something. No,
we use the statewide unfunded needs process to effectively funding.
As you know, this includes one time contributions from all courts
into a central budget then that is used to fund items
that we do not the resources for at the start of a biennium.
The items on the statewide unfunded needs priorities list
is typically items such as servers, data storage, a lot of technology
needs for our employees and judges, pilot projects, etc.
things that benefit the whole state.
Okay, so to be clear, well, I heard it this morning at all.
We only had a nickel left.
We're not sitting around on June 30th saying what we spend our money on.
It's part of a very comprehensive plan
that we have.
So of the $804 million general fund budget and 2223,
the branch canceled back $0.05 at closing of the biennium.
That's pretty impressive for how decentralized we are for a financial area.
You need to say that.
I mean, be clear then, Chief.
So the $804 million general fund budget
and 22 and 23 branch
canceled back a nickel at the closing of the biennium.
That's pretty impressive So and it takes off.
It's not just me.
It's a lot of my staff so with that said I do need that thing
some people that's CEO finance
specifically Brett Richter Theresa
Fong and all of the county managers across the state.
This group works really very well together.
I mean, they really communicate very well.
This report will be boring now.
So, you know, your eyes can now glaze over and you can anticipate lunch
because, you know, the thunder's already gone.
But, you know, Chief asked me prior about six years ago,
well, how do other agencies, what do they end up with?
Do you want to know that?
Just a few samples I thought you would.
So just to give you a few.
I just picked a few, but Administration Department 66,000.
Agriculture Department 600,000.
Attorney General 771,000 or two.
Public Defense 527,000.
Commerce 6.8 million.
Corrections 1.9 million Corrections 1.9 million. Yes.
1.9 million.
The canceled back.
1.9 million.
And I don't know what four or so don't be.
Employee in economic development.
One point Labor and Industry 2.1.
Minnesota Management and Budget 382,000.
So those are DNR 11 million
public 16 million
Revenue department 1.8 million
between DHS Health and Education
$258 million.
But here's sort of some sad news.
I do got to relay Minnesota Zoo zero.
So I you know, a monkey could do my job.
Monkey could do my job. So
so I to a
monkey. No.
All right.
I'll get I'll go briefly over the report because I'm in between you and lunch.
And I love lunch.
So I'm going to go over this quickly.
If you turn to page three and you see it on the screen.
But again, it's pretty small.
Again, we effectively utilize the $804 million budget.
We also effectively maximize some of our funding mechanisms
to carry forward in a 24, 25, about $6.7 million, essentially
to fund a projected deficit of $2.5 million in our four D accounts.
That's just because of the pandemic and the way that works.
And also pay for some of the project staff,
along with ongoing projects such as the Human Resource Project,
External Application Support, those are some of the things we did.
And then below you can see what we used the statewide unfunded needs for.
And I'm not going to go through every item,
but again, it's for statewide purposes.
So whenever you think you're given a contribution,
it's not just to Saint Paul, it's for the entirety of the state.
And I want to communicate that
here.
You get to these numbers.
I blow it up a little bit.
The 23 budget, $428.1 million
the year to date expenditures are about $420 million.
So the total projected expenses are 428.1.
Obviously, what the balance of a nickel $0.02 in the trial courts
that was in the judge budget and Supreme Court had $0.03
sorry to $0.03.
So that's.
Yeah,
okay.
Get to the next.
These have been the general fund biennial cancellations
throughout the biennium here at the branch.
And you can see with the Chiefs direction, they've gone down and down
as we went along.
And I don't need to go through all the numbers.
Supreme Court again, there was $0.03 left over there.
Court of Appeals was zero
of their budget.
Only one budget love it.
Trial courts, very complicated budget.
But you can see there was $0.02 left
over for the trial courts and the judge budget just appeal.
That cancels during the closing process.
Same with the court.
Okay, so this is an area of concern.
That's next. PAGE This is mandated services.
And you can see
from the original budget, the original budget was $16.76 million.
And you can see the current budget is $22.8 million.
And that is what we spend this fiscal year.
That's a difference, $6 million.
So this is an area of major
concern for 24, 25 and into the future.
And you can see if you down below
you see the areas of mandated services and the two that are
we get a little heartburn over of course is psych services.
The original budget there was 7.6 million and we spent $11.7
million, roughly a difference of 4.1 million.
And the interpreter?
The original budget was 4.2 million and we spent $5.6 million.
Again, area of concern.
And so we'll need to address those concerns either
through more budget request or things we can do internally.
Like you had discussions before on some of the psych issues
that we're going to have to address in the near future
treatment courts.
That is about a little over $5 million budget
and they spent all of their money.
Again, I'm going to go over this quick.
Senior judges.
We spent about $670,000.
That's typical.
We range anywhere from 500 to hundred and $50,000 a year.
So this was a typical year.
Plus we used a lot of ARP money to fund additional senior judges
to help with the backlog, which is the next page.
So this is the American Rescue plan.
The original budget was 9.961 million.
That's what the current budget was.
And you can see from district to district, those
that you see the current budget is less than the original budget.
They gave up resources to other districts that needed money.
So if you see a district with a lower original budget than the current budget,
they needed more resources to help with the backlog.
And we did spend all of the money for this.
It's federal money
for D.
You can see
the original budget is about $7.2 million and the current budget is 14.3.
That basically means we carry forward a
little over $7 million for this budget
from 22 to 23.
You can see we have an uncommitted balance of about 9.9 million.
That's what we'll carry forward through this funding
to 24 and 25
unfunded needs,
contributions to unfunded needs from all courts.
And you can see the respective districts
or central budgets or a court of appeals, Supreme Court.
But to contribute since we're at 20.4 million, roughly
two years ago, that number was $26.4 million.
So was less than last biennium.
But with a little caveat.
If you recall, there was lump sums provided
of about $12 million in fiscal year 23.
So you can see from the
page all of the projects that were done.
I went over those in the opening slides, but those are the projects that were done.
I to get this.
So to wrap this up,
you can see as far as you, this is all judicial courts.
This is the budget summary.
You see the general fund and 44 the trial courts
will roll forward about $9.916 million
of 40 funding into 24 and 25.
The Court of Appeals,
they wound up with zero general fund dollars and they do not have four D funds.
So they their balance is zero.
And the Supreme Court, they will roll forward
a little over $1,000,000 from 40 funds into 24.
So for the branch general fund
cancellations, $0.05
and then roll forward of 40 about almost $11 Million
then for
receipts, these are receipts you can see from 22 to 23
receipts are up about $8.5 million,
which is about 7%.
And, you know, some of this is attributable to getting over the pandemic
and and Department of Revenue, also their receipts are up
roughly $4.2 million, about 24%.
So that is it.
Chief, your last one. What do you think?
That's amazing. Amazing.
Any questions from the council?
I've been described as a control freak,
and I understand that I can't control what happens after I leave,
but I do have a gift to give to Dan in the finance
in an effort to control what happens after I leave.
So, you know,
Joe could be.
It's a
this is a piggy
and it's got the
plumber.
Minnesota, our hundredth anniversary is noted.
That's when I got this piggy bank.
And you, it's pretty small.
So you can only put in you can only turn back to the state
what you can fit in the piggy bank.
And so I'll put the nickel in there for this year
and then you can use it going forward as an incentive.
Thank you.
Wow. You're going away present in all these districts.
Give you all these fancy gifts. Yeah.
And I told the finance staff, whatever we have left over
we're going to use for your gift.
It's awesome.
Thank you, Dan, Thank you.
And thanks to your staff.
Really, really great work.
All right, Item number nine is
the payables list.
So just to sort of set the stage for this,
the payables list
approval process is set out in judicial council policy.
506 But what happens is at the close of every regular legislative session,
look at legislative changes to determine if we need to update the payables list.
So the way the process works is the council then
refers the payables list to the cops.
State court administration then sends out an email soliciting
requests for revision from Justice partners and interested parties.
Once those proposed revisions are submitted, cops
then reviews the requested changes and submits
proposed recommendations to the list to the council.
That's What we're doing now, Judge Hilliard, who chairs
the committee, is going to present the proposed
recommended recommendations to the payables list.
And then if we approve, the list goes out for public comment
and then it comes back to the Council in November for final approval
and it goes into effect January of 24.
Judge Hill,
a good chief, and I think
we're
these are questions that you want to recognize
the staff.
And the first tab just gave me the ear saying,
and since I'm recognizing her, I should turn a microphone on.
Deb is kind of our resident expert in tracking
legislation, has been involved in in the payables list for quite some time.
So we're going to certainly miss, Deb, Deb's expertise dealing with all things
statutory and rulemaking and what they mean to the payables list.
And then Karen Jesu, she is also a staff member who supports the payables effort.
COPS Committee met after the last Judicial Council meeting
and went through the requests by our partner agencies, mainly
related to the Department of Natural Resources
and the trucks and common carriers, portions of the list.
And in the staff report you can see
the items that were discussed by the COPS committee and the actions
that were approved by the COPS committee for recommendation today.
And ultimately then for Judicial Council to decide to publish the lists
publicly for comment before it comes back for final approval by Judicial Council.
So I'll
go to the at least to some of the requests.
But before I do that, I'll just note
there wasn't anything all that exciting, although we did return two turtles
from the DNR, I think it was called the spiny Softshell Turtle
and some some changes to harvesting turtles
in general in Minnesota that made it to the payables list,
which I don't quite recall the specifics of today,
but I'll go through the requested changes came in from partner
agencies, the first from senior Judge Tim Looby
related to window tents.
Judge Luby was concerned about dark window tents
and the safety issues that that poses to law enforcement.
Cops reviewed that request.
It's kind of an annual from Judge Looby.
We've never supported it before, although we understand the issue.
But that issue has never been raised to us by the Minnesota State
Patrol or law enforcement, at least at this point, did not feel
it was necessary to make a change to raise
the presumptive fine for Window ten.
I should note we started conversation with whether or not to change the petty
misdemeanor default to from $50 to some other amount,
typically meaning that should we charge a higher amount for the standard
fine for a petty misdemeanor.
Again, nobody has at this
point has asked for an increase in the standard fine amount.
We haven't heard from partner agencies that they're looking for that.
Obviously, a lot of that money either goes to the general fund
or goes to partner agencies anyway.
And so least at this point, given what we know
of how the payables list runs through the court system,
we're not recommending any changes to the default
petty misdemeanor M.O.
I mentioned the window ten.
Again, it's not a request coming from state patrol.
There are a few cases of window tint violations and typically
we don't see citations just for window tint violations.
They come in the form of citations with oftentimes
three or four different charges.
Many times, which the window tents are dismissed
by plea to other offenses.
So although we understand the issue, cops is not recommending
any changes to the standard fine amount for window tint violations.
I think you all also recognize that
many times when
we see a window tint violation, the person
with the illegal window tint explains to us that they just bought the car.
They didn't know it was illegal, and unless they bought it from a dealer,
that's entirely possible.
The next was a recommendation to make changes
to the payable status for careless driving and vehicle insurance charges.
A request by a municipal prosecutor
to require a court appearance in those.
That is also kind of an annual request.
Cops is not recommending to make that change.
If there is a safety issue,
it's always possible for a prosecutor to charge that
by a formal complaint or an officer can simply check
the endangerment box to require a court appearance.
And so that possibility of requiring a court appearance is already there.
And we don't think that needs to be standard practice.
I don't have a
lot to say about trucks and common carriers.
You know, those have come in and those recommendations
were not controversial yet.
The cops committee
and really the most of the conversation
dealt with the Minnesota legislature's
legalization of marijuana in chapter 342.
If you looked at Chapter 342, sometimes it gets really deep into the weeds.
It's hard to understand, but are both civil penalties and criminal penalties.
In chapter 342, with legalization of marijuana in Minnesota recreationally,
there are also criminal penalties in Minnesota Chapter 152.
And sometimes they're very similar. They conflict.
And so it is a bit confusing.
So the COPS committee considered whether to list certain violations
of Minnesota Chapter 342 on the payables list,
and if so, what amount should be charged for those again, with
with the criminal penalties in 152, we didn't want to be inconsistent with 152
and because there's both
in chapter 342, what you can legally do
with recreational marijuana and what you're not supposed to do.
And it's somewhat gets confusing.
And then the idea that because the legislature
did not set a specific penalty for possession marijuana
illegally by default, it becomes a petty misdemeanor.
You might recall
historically that if there was no criminal
penalty listed by the legislature, it became a misdemeanor offense
That now is a petty misdemeanor rather than a misdemeanor.
So all of these violations in chapter 342 likely would be a petty misdemeanor
If they're the standard, petty misdemeanor fined would be $50.
After reviewing Chapter three two
and its main provisions, cops discussed
whether or not those should be become part of the payables list.
Cops is recommending not to list those on the payables list
because of the confusion it might might cause with chapter 152.
We're also not recommending it because we certainly don't want to endorse
the idea that violations of Chapter 342 should be petty misdemeanors.
We do think that there might be some clarification coming
from the legislature in the future about Chapter 342 and criminal penalties.
And so at this point, Copps is not recommending listing the 342 violations on the
on the payables list.
I think
I'll maybe just pause there because some of you might have questions
about Chapter 342 and either Jenn or Deb might be better
equipped to handle some of those questions about the legalization
of recreational marijuana in Minnesota.
So let me pause, pause there and just see if there are any questions.
Maybe there are so
it's like we're good.
Okay.
I mentioned some of the DNR changes.
I guess,
you know, most of the changes recommended from the DNR is a focus
wetlands and restricted areas.
And so there's some comments in the staff reports about the changes
being recommended about not only trespassing on wetlands by motor vehicles,
but other ways in which you can trespass in wetlands, state wetlands
and and criminal provisions
to those that end up on the payables list.
There's also rule 620
3.66232.1600, which repealed
the commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources, repealed that rule.
So that had to be removed from the payables list.
And then after our meeting, the DNR requested two new payables
related to hunting with the wrong type of ammunition on public lands.
And so for those of you who aren't waterfowl or upland game
hunters, when you're hunting on public land,
you cannot use toxic shot, which means lead.
You have to use some other form of of ammunition.
And so if you're caught hunting with the wrong type of ammunition,
there are two new listed offenses asked for by the Department
of Natural Resources not considered by cops.
I don't think they're necessarily controversial.
In the past, we've waited until the following year
to list things on the payables list, but we have taken some exceptions to that.
When they're noncontroversial, I think these fall in that category.
I guess we haven't heard otherwise, Jenn, have we
know and
at the requested $50, the minimum fine,
$50 fine.
So at least as the chair, I don't think there's any real controversy
related to adding those two for public comment.
And at least my recommendation personally would be to add those for public comment
and include them when the lists come back to
Judicial Council for final approval.
You just mentioned trucks and common carriers.
I wasn't going to say much about it, but most of the changes requested
there relate to overall oversize loads and hauling forest products,
so I won't get into the details there.
So again, at this point we're looking for prelim, preliminary
approval of those changes as requested and reviewed by the COPS committee
and to publish the preliminary list for a 30 day period
for public comment before it comes back to judicial council for final approval.
Thank you, Judge.
Are there any questions?
So before the Council
would be a motion to approve the proposed 2424 payables
list for purposes of publishing the list for public comment?
So, all right.
Any discussion on the motion?
All those in favor signify by saying
I, I almost.
All right. Motion carries. Thank you.
Good job, Cops.
Good job. Churchill Yes, thank you. Jan.
Okay, now we are on to other business.
The October meeting of the Judicial Council is canceled,
so there will not be an October Judicial Council meeting.
The only I think the only other thing on our agenda
under other business is to recognize departing members.
And I want to recognize President Lois Conroy.
This is her last meeting.
So we want to thank you, Judge Kyra,
the council, and
give you this beautiful trophy.
And it's my last meeting,
so I have a couple of gifts.
This is for the vice chair, Judge Lawson.
It's a bobblehead of Belva Lockwood.
Does everybody know who?
Belva Lockwood is?
Yes. No, no, no.
The first woman who argued before the United States Supreme Court.
So she's a trailblazer.
You're a trailblazer.
Thank You Judge Lawson.
Your leadership
and I have something for Jeff, which I don't think requires
any explanations.
I and
and then just
for all of you, I'm going to leave this
so that you will always be reminded
it when the people need us to do hard things.
We do hard things.
Okay.
Thanks
to the others
as they happen, we'll decide what needs.
Well, with that, Chief Justice Gilday,
the council would like to recognize you as well today.
No marching bands or college.
Sorry if anyone has a harmonica in your pocket.
Or you could pull it out now.
No, no harmonicas.
That being said, it's just really appropriate that
the last piece of business on your last meeting is the council coming together
to acknowledge and just really send you
with the send off that that you deserve,
which is a send off that shows huge respect,
huge admiration and huge appreciation for the strong, positive leadership
that you have provided to both the judicial branch
and the Judicial Council since 2010 when you were appointed.
Now, we have several folks here today who have some things
they'd like to say to you.
Yeah, this is not a rose.
At least I don't think is.
Well, we'll see how that goes.
So let's start our search. Could as well.
Although we could turn it into a rose.
Chief, Hard to believe that this day is finally here.
And I know you've been counting.
So how many days left?
Seven, 17.
Well, I was fortunate to be around this table
at your first meeting, and I'm
honored to be here at your last meeting.
When I look at your tenure, I see your vision,
optimism, professionalism,
and your relentless
drive for continuous improvement
as the hallmark of the character and characteristics of your 13 years here.
Not many people that we could develop online
pajama access, as you always referred to it, court records.
But you did.
You led the charge reimagine court operations during COVID,
and then you challenged the courts to eliminate the backlog.
Not easy, but as the T-shirt just showed
we all know you do hard things and you push us to do the same.
The push, though, was always
accompanied by you praising and thank King
all the employees of the branch
throughout this time.
I was able to witness firsthand
the impact of your presence at the legislature and the relationships
you built across the street through our meetings with members,
and they often heard from legislators how impressed they were
that you were the one that came over to meet them.
And you had time in their office
to listen to their stories and learn about their families.
And you called them to thank them for their support.
That left
indelible impressions on those members over.
You were never a stranger in the halls of the Capitol nor
in the offices of the governor.
And that yielded positive results year after year for.
The judicial branch.
But the best thing
that I will always remember is your laugh.
I can't recall over the many times that we talked that we didn't
have a good laugh to lighten the issue and to put things in perspective.
And I so much appreciate that about you.
You've accomplished much and you'll leave the people of Minnesota
with a strong and very well-respected judiciary.
Thanks for your 13 years of leadership at the helm here.
You'll be greatly missed.
Thanks.
And I have to tell
the other
I can't I can't get this out without laughing.
I tell it to myself in the car sometimes, and I mean it.
So what did one I say to the other?
Just between us.
Something smells
on, right?
Look at Judge Barnett. It's like whatever.
I don't think
I can follow that up, but I'm going to try.
Chief, I think you're going to hear
some similar themes throughout
the accolades that you're going to hear in a moment.
The words that thought of
when I thought about you and what I would say to you today,
our leadership, both locally and nationally.
Your integrity,
your vision
and your commitment to the rule of law.
So during an interview that you gave soon
after your announcement of your retirement announcement,
you stated Minnesota is viewed as among the most innovative
and well-managed court systems in the entire country, and the credit
for that success goes to our dedicated judicial branch employees and judges.
As Judge Goodson said, you've given the credit to others.
I will add that we are that
because of you,
Chief.
You pushed us to be better.
You inspired us to think bigger.
You guided us through some good
and through some difficult.
It pains me to witness
what's happening in some other states.
State courts around the country, especially as, we think about what
our neighbors to the east are currently experiencing.
And I am thankful.
And frankly, we are fortunate
that we have, a chief justice, a leader that has not allowed us to go down
that path of divisiveness and partizanship.
We are a strong third branch of government.
You have worked tirelessly
to keep independence secure
while at the same time ensuring that the other branches of government
are given the respect, deference and comity the law requires.
You leave behind a legacy of
strength, stability, asset stability
and confidence and respect in the judiciary.
If the true measure of a career
well lived is to have left it better than you found, it,
I can say without hesitation
that we are better because of you.
Thank you, Chief.
You will be missed.
I wish you all the best as you take on
your next challenge.
I think Judge Barnett
has a few words on the Zone's eve.
I'm sorry I can't be there, but I have a few words.
Your strong leadership
and your many accomplishments come with great sacrifice.
And those sacrifices.
A lot of times are personal.
No one knows the sacrifice.
The sacrifices you've made for the branch.
No one knows that.
Many times you wondered, Is this the right thing for the branch?
No one knows about the sleepless nights
or the late night phone calls or the endless frustrations
with the other nine Chief Justice judges around the state.
Here's what I do know.
I'm your favorite chief, and here's why.
I'll tell you.
During the pandemic, during the Derek Chauvin trial,
during the Kim Potter trial, during the other struggles
the Chiefs had with the backlog in their remote
hearings, we talked a lot.
You just made me feel so special about being the only district in the state
which was in person for housing cases
or when you started getting when we started getting the Monday reports
on backlog in the fourth District was ninth
and 10th place in every judicial council meeting.
You would pull me to the side at lunch and we would talk about that.
The fourth Judicial District's backlog.
I felt very special.
I know I wanted I want you to know that I really felt
like the youngest of of ten kids
because you gave me all the attention that the other and I didn't get.
Chief, also like to say I appreciate it.
The special emails that you would send with the subject line
that said we need to talk or it's time to talk.
I took those moments to mean that the other chiefs,
of course, were being naughty and you wanted to talk about.
But in fact, somehow we always ended
talking about me, your favorite.
I know that you have been frustrated, concerned
and probably angry at times that are at the other chiefs.
I know that they have pushed you
and asked you to do things that you felt uncomfortable with as your favorite.
I want to say thank you for being patient with them.
Seriously, Chief.
We've had some very tough conversations,
but I would like to say every time
we talked in person or over the phone,
no matter how intense that conversation was,
you never let the conversation end
without saying, Is there anything you need?
Is there anything that I can do?
And that meant a lot. You
have never failed to lead us as a branch because you care about the branch.
You care about the people that work in the branch.
You care about the people that enter
every courthouse in the state of Minnesota.
So thank you for your service.
Thank you for your leadership.
God bless you.
You are my favorite
Go to lesson, if I may.
If there's anyone else first. Oh, go, Mama.
Go, go, go.
Oh, so I.
I think you know, some the recent accomplishment accomplishments,
clearly what we talked about today with with the Nicole, you know,
but Dan Slow showed that slide that showed the progression
of how we have continued to get better in that area.
You know that's that's from your leadership and from you
pushing us to be better.
You know we wouldn't all be sitting with computers
at Judicial Council meetings if it wasn't for E Court Minnesota.
And that was a huge five year initiative that you challenged us
to do.
You know, we've had remarkable increases for our judges and our staff.
That gets back to what Judge Knutson was talking about
with your tremendous leadership across the street,
the fact that we now have equity and inclusion as such a forefront
of what we do in the judicial branch.
And I think you've not promoted change for the sake of change.
And I'm going to quote you here from one your speeches where you said failure
on our part to begin preparing our court system to meet
those challenges would not only have disastrous consequence,
but it would represent a failure of our duty to provide good, stewarded,
good stewardship to the judiciary in Minnesota.
You know,
we don't just change because that's that's something that we feel like doing.
It's because it's our obligation.
And you reminded us and you led us during those obligations
as a district administrator.
I have greatly appreciated how much
you have appreciated us as administrators
and you have included us.
We've had the voice at the table and has been a respected voice at the table.
I think of your leadership during the pandemic.
You know, it's it's kind of hard to remember what it was really like,
especially when when March of 2020 actually happened.
But I went back and I looked and we had 32 zoom discussions between
chief judges and district administrators
from March of 20 to the end of 21.
And that wasn't just about hearing from the chief judges,
that was about hearing from us as administrator as as well,
you know, that notion that Judge Barnett said about how can I help?
What can I do?
That was a common theme during those discussions.
The other thing that I really appreciate is, Chief,
you have always had an eye on what is best for the branch
and how can we as the branch,
do our best to provide judicial services, whether you're in Ely,
whether you're in Luverne, or you're somewhere in between,
that has been your priority.
And I certainly thank you for that.
I do have a story
and, you know, it was, I don't know, maybe five,
six years ago when the veterans court in the Third Judicial District,
we were in the
you know, the chief came down and we we had a kickoff
and we had a kickoff in two locations within the third Judicial District.
One was in Owatonna and one was in Preston.
And so geographically, those are a couple of hours apart.
And so the chief obviously drove down from the cities
to get to Owatonna for the first session and then was going to go
to Preston later in in the day.
And I thought, well, you know, there's no reason for a number of us to be going
to the same locations multiple miles as good stewards of our money.
So I put something out there to the chief.
Hey, you know, if you want to ride together, I'm more than happy.
Happy to drive.
Never did I think she'd.
She'd actually say yes.
And then it was like, holy, no, no.
But it was.
It was like, holy crap.
Said yes, you know, And,
and before that, you know, I knew the chief from council meetings or,
you know, some kinds of interactions, but never knew the chief,
you know in terms of,
All right, we're going to ride for a couple of hours in in the car.
And you know what a delightful conversation.
You know, we talk about books.
We we talked about kinds of things.
And, you know, it really gave me
a different perspective of the chief.
And and it certainly has helped me to respect you more,
you know, doing all of those hard things and making those hard decisions,
being the one that is leading
all of us is no small task.
And yet the chief is is a human with a great sense of humor
and a delight to ride in a car with for several hours.
So I, I very much appreciate how inclusive you have been,
not just of judges, but those of us that are administrators as well.
And and good luck in your next adventure.
Thanks, Kelly.
Justice Hudson.
And then we'll hear from Judge Byers.
And Chief,
I just wanted to acknowledge, obviously, what a difficult position this is.
But you've done it so well.
You've shouldered the immense responsibilities of this position
with grace and dignity and an enviable strength of character.
When I think about great leaders, I think they possess two main characteristics.
First, they have a love and respect for the institution they lead.
And you've heard that from several people here today.
And you are like a mama bear.
That's how I characterize it when it comes to guarding
and upholding the integrity and the reputation
not only of judicial council and, the judicial branch,
but I know I speak for the entire Supreme Court when I when I say that
and you've done it many
times at the expense of your own personal preferences.
And certainly on the court, we've seen that over and over again.
One of the things you may not remember telling me this, but
I think you said at one point when you first became chief,
I think Russell Anderson said to you at all costs,
protect the institution and you have done that.
You've protected the institution of the Supreme Court,
you've protected the institution of judicial Council,
you've protected the institution, the judicial branch.
And the people of Minnesota are better for it.
You are the protector in chief.
And secondly, great leaders to the occasion.
And you've led the judicial branch
through some rough patches.
You've heard some of that here today over your last 13 years.
But I think they all likely pale in the face
of what you did during the COVID pandemic that that gripped
the nation, gripped the state and gripped this court system.
But you rose to the occasion.
They say the difficulties build character, but I think it's more accurate
to say the difficulties reveal character
and the pandemic revealed your true strength of character.
And to that end, you were
steadfast fast, you were thoughtful, you were courageous, and you successfully
led the branch and this council
through a very difficult time in our history.
It has been my honor to serve
with you on the Supreme Court, and it is my honor
to follow your tenure as chief justice, and I hope I will do it justice.
So thank you, Chief.
It's been my pleasure, my honor.
And I wish you very, very best.
Chief Justice, it's been such an honor
and a privilege and a pleasure to serve on judicial council.
And I have learned so much
from you about leadership.
I have to say, I really appreciate that you're one of the people
who consistently gets my small town North Dakota humor.
But you have been
so instrumental in shaping the Minnesota judicial branch
to be one of the best and most respected
judiciaries in the country.
Rosalyn Carter once said that leaders
take people where they want to go, but a great leader
takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but they ought to.
And I've watched you do that many times.
You've been a great leader, an innovative leader.
You led us through, as many people have mentioned, through an
unimaginably difficult time
with courage and grace,
patience and occasional humor, which I always appreciate.
I've been inspired an
adopted your reminders that we do hard things
and that hope is not a plan.
And I have also appreciated your eloquent reminders
that we must keep our constitutional promise
to the people of Minnesota, to the people that we.
So the branch, the
Judicial Council and the people of Minnesota are
will be forever in your debt.
And I don't know what.
The next chapter will bring you dropped a few hints recently,
but I do know that you'll embrace your new challenges
with the same energy and passion integrity that you brought to the branch.
So I'll miss you.
We'll all miss you, but we certainly wish you well.
Thank you.
Anderson.
Well, I call, I think, what everybody has said
so far, so I'm not going to plow that same field.
But just what I've noticed most is leadership
with integrity, with a focus on doing is best for the branch.
And when we've had those hard discussions and maybe things didn't go
the way that you would have perhaps wanted, you still followed through.
And that takes, I think, a lot of integrity that even when
things did not go as perhaps desired,
then you continue to lead
with that policy going forward.
And I think that that's a mark of real integrity and leadership.
They also when this COVID thing started,
it became apparent that we one reason we were able to get through
that is because of initiatives had happened some years earlier,
branch policies and investments in technology and investments
in policy that enabled us to
as nimbly as we could move into that remote
hearing era.
And that will continue going.
And a couple of things that I really appreciate.
What was the credit you give to others in remembering
and thanking people throughout the branch
and throughout this room,
But everybody who has
done the work and you recognize that and give credit for that.
And I think that shows real respect from others.
And I think that's one reason people respect you so much.
I will say we worked on the Leader or the Education Committee for the
Judges conference several years ago
and in way you show respect for others is the way you keep meetings going.
We start on time.
We keep them going and we don't stray too often from the task hand.
And that shows real respect, I think, for everybody who is participating.
So thank you very much.
And I hope that your next chapter is
is enjoyable and and that you find joy in that as well.
So thank you for your leadership
while Chief,
I have lots of stories.
There's one more left
now I'm going to say most of them for the book.
I can tell you the Chief Justice likes being driven around.
I could have told you that. Shelly.
She's not crazy about these kind of parties where we talk about her.
So I'm going to try to limit, but I have a present and I'm going to talk
about that in a minute.
So it's been a great partnership.
I really the trust you put in me
as state court administrator and we,
I think, have had a lot of challenges as people talked about.
But I have learned so much from you and you've been a great advisor
and a great leader.
And as Shelly said, I've really put a lot of trust
in court administration and we really appreciate that.
So I am sad to see you go.
Looking forward to working with Chief Justice Hudson in her new role,
but it takes a while to get to know each other.
So 13 years ago, we had a little bit of a rocky start
and I made the chief justice sit down and
go through all these briefing books about everything we do in the state courts.
And she was like, Oh my God,
when this is going to end and get me out of here right now.
But you've really become such a great leader for our branch,
and the partnership has been really important to me also.
You know, we've gone through a whole lot of things in the branch, but
we've also gone through a lot of things personally during our time together.
And as you all said, she's been very caring and compassionate
and I really appreciate that.
So we have a gift.
I know you didn't want things,
so I don't think you have to hang this on the wall.
I don't think you need to trust it,
but it's from
us in the branch just to you, some ideas about what we remember about you.
And I didn't do any of the wrapping, but the box can be reused at Christmas.
I've been told.
Oh, nice
guitar bass.
That's awesome.
It's a book that everyone's contributed to, to give some thought.
Thank you so much about your tenure.
So thank you so much.
That's amazing.
Oh, there's even something it from Judge Barnett
that we didn't have ever.
I didn't know.
We're good.
Okay, Chief, this as you're thinking to yourself, will this ever
And thankfully, it is about to end because I am batting cleanup.
There's like ten of us have spoken, but I'm still batting cleanup,
even though that's the fourth spot in the order.
You know,
you can take the chief out of plumber,
but you can't take the plumber out of the chief justice.
And that noise you hear is the chief justice
grinding her teeth about people saying all these nice things about her.
And she hears Russ Anderson chirping in her ear about this
doesn't have anything to do
with delivering the work of the branch and I'll get to work
but I'm going to take just a couple of minutes
to talk about leadership in a little different way then some of
the valuable contributions that have been made today,
because I want to talk about a specific way in which a specific event
in which leadership was demonstrated.
Now, we all know that we have remote access to documents, right?
There are lawyers are beginning their practice today.
Last year, two years ago, ten or 15 years from now, who treat this
as some kind of inevitability this is the way the world runs.
This is the way it's the world is always run, but it is not
in fact, the way the way, the way the world has always run.
One. The great
philosophers of Rome once said,
Anyone can helm the ship
in a clean and clear and flat sea.
But it's when the sea is rough, you see your leaders.
So I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because some of it
actually comes from closed meetings.
And I've got the the lawyer for the branch sitting at my right elbow
about ready to yank, to take the hook out and yank me off the floor here.
But but I want to talk a little bit because so many people around this table
may not have known this story, the decision
to move to that remote access
and to to aggressively move to a remote access was not made in a vacuum.
It was made in an environment where there were a lot of problems,
a lot of meetings, a lot of meetings with the lawyer, a lot of meetings with
a large commercial vendor.
Things hadn't gone well between the relationship
between the vendor in the branch.
Letters were written,
things were said, and then,
all right, people, court administrator, come to the chief and say,
We think we can do this internally.
Now, of course, it's going to be ultimately decision
of the Judicial Council, but it's the leader, one person in the room that says,
all right,
we're going to try this, we're going to make this work.
Now, that decision, in retrospect, looks easy, right?
The system works well.
People have access to documents.
They my first job is as a high school kid, wanted to be a lawyer,
was to get into my 73 Ford Pinto on behalf of the late Chuck Adamson,
who was a public defender in Mankato, to run around and get documents and
file things.
And what that time disappeared.
But it was not inevitable. And
when those kinds of projects go bad,
you have press coverage, you have legislative hearings,
editorials in the newspaper, etc..
And yet
the chief makes the call, I think are people can do this.
And if those of you who participated in some of those meetings know why
she made that call,
because those documents don't belong to us, the employees.
They don't belong to the parties who filed them.
They belong to the people of the state of Minnesota.
They're public documents. Right.
And so the public is going to have access to them.
And how is that project turned out in the course
of the time that we've had the roll out of access
to public documents, Some 9 million documents have downloaded.
Documents are being downloaded at the rate of 1400 documents an hour.
Minnesota is a leader in that.
In fact, we're such a leader pension is running articles
complaining about too much public access.
All right.
Well, we'll leave the merits of the argument
for another time, Chief, But I'm going to say to you that
and she's heard me say this before, but one of my favorite leadership quotes
comes from former Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, the first woman
to occupy that role who once said, you manage things, but you lead people
in chief on behalf of the Judicial Council.
It is to great regret that you leave, but to our great benefit
that you've been our leader.
And I have to give you now your statue
right?
So Hillary Clinton was right about what
she said. It takes a village to
bring justice,
be in the village.
We're all making so much of let's
let's take a motion to here.
So moved.