A month and a half ago, we started badgering communications office staff at the rapidly growing state Administrative Office of the Courts for information on how much its employees were paid. We were interested because of the hard times facing the judicial system and its leaders’ unprecedented decisions to save money by closing courts one day a month and furloughing our members.
Forty-four days later, we finally got our answer. The AOC’s top official, William Vickrey, makes $227,196 a year; a longtime consultant, McGeorge School of Law Professor J. Clark Kelso, makes $224,004; and Vickrey’s chief deputy, Ronald G. Overholt, is paid $221,952. They are the only employees making more than $200,000.
Thirty-five others make more than $150,000.
And 253 — or 27% of the agency’s 948 staffers — are paid at a rate of at least $100,000 a year.
These figures did not astonish us. Vickrey had explained at a recent legislative hearing on a billion-dollar-plus computer system his agency is developing that it has had to employ more highly educated workers as it has taken on from the counties increasing responsibilities to run the courts.
But the issue isn’t pay as much as it is transparency.
“The AOC doesn’t seem to be getting the message that it is a public agency, responsible to the taxpayers,” said LA County Court Reporter Buford James, who was at the hearing.
At the same hearing, Vickrey told legislators that his office regards salary information as public. This puzzled us at the time because, by then, we had made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to get that salary information by following instructions on the AOC’s website and following up with telephone calls.
When the information finally arrived, it came with an explanation. The AOC never intended to stiff us, we were told. We were just a victim of snafus.
That’s actually encouraging. It is a departure from the traditional, secretive, “trust us” attitude of the courts bureaucracy.
But in some areas that is proving difficult to jettison.
For instance, on the computer front, the Administrative Office of the Courts puts the cost of the new system at $1.7 billion – sort of.
That figure, the AOC says, unfairly counts $180 million for interim systems developed along the way. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Daily Journal reports that the AOC is not counting millions spent by trial courts in individual counties. And the Sacramento Bee estimates the final price tag at $2 billion.
It remains hard to know whom to trust.
-Ted Rohrlich