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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Court - Kentucky courthouse spending spree hits bottom line

Indiana generally tries to preserve its existing courthouses. But, in Kentucky, according to this editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

When it comes to building courthouses, Kentucky is the state that just can't say no.

As a result of those easy ways, as the Herald-Leader's Linda Blackford recently reported, legislators and judicial officials are more preoccupied with balancing budgets than the scales of justice.

It's a sad story of collective self-indulgence. Kentucky's current fiscal crisis can be chalked up to many factors but one — amply demonstrated in the courthouse disaster — is garnering political favor by scattering building projects around the state with the idea that the bill will come due later.

Here's the back story: Former Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph E. Lambert embarked on a campaign to replace county courthouses in all of Kentucky's 120 counties. It's kind of a build-now-pay-later deal with the bonds for the new buildings only coming due when they are close to being complete and occupied. That can make it easy to approve projects (no impact in this fiscal year) and hard to pay for them.

This year, it's particularly hard to pay for them as the governor and legislature struggle to fill a gaping hole in the state budget. * * *

Chief Justice Joseph Minton, who inherited this mess from his successor, has tried to put the brakes to the runaway building. In the last budget cycle, the Administrative Office of the Courts, which Minton directs, recommended only one new courthouse — for Carlisle County where the previous one had burned.

Legislators, though, added four more in Allen, Bracken, Lawrence and Morgan counties. The economic and judicial logic may have been blurry but the political logic was crystal clear: "If people from around the state are going to get one, my folks deserve one, too," said Rep. Mike Denham, D-Maysville, who represents Bracken County.

So the debt grows and where it ends no one knows.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 18, 2010 09:15 AM
Posted to Courts in general