Help wanted in most Iowa courthouses

CEDAR RAPIDS - Nine of Iowa's 14 judicial districts - including the local 6th District - do not have enough staff to efficiently handle their caseloads while the others have too much staff, a state study shows.

The research, called the Iowa Judicial Officer Workload Assessment Study, shows the 6th District needs another 2.4 district judges - up from the current 13 - and 1.1 more associate judges and associate juvenile judges, up from the current authorization of 7.8.

In contrast, District 8B in Southeastern Iowa has 11 percent more district and associate judges than its workload calls for, the study found.

But statewide, the study found Iowa needs 15 more district and associate judges.

'The overall study showed resources - money - has been static, while filings have gone up and the population has grown,” said 6th District Judge Fae Hoover-Grinde, who served on the study committee.

The purpose of the research was to show in hard data what is actually needed in each district, and how the courts and staff are affected, Hoover-Grinde said.

The committee hoped the data would persuade lawmakers that this branch of government needs more support.

Hoover-Grinde said the study made committee members realize every district has its own challenges and issues.

'In the 6th, we have two of top five most populous counties - Linn, ranked No. 2 with 221,661, and Johnson, No. 4 with 146,547.”

The other counties in the 6th District and their populations are:

' Benton: 25,669

' Jones: 20,439

' Tama: 17,319

' Iowa: 16,311

The number of case filings in district and associate district courts for the 6th was 84,367 in 2016, according to court administration.

Hoover-Grinde said a special challenge in the 6th District is that judges have to travel to four of the counties one or two days a week for service days - where court pleas, sentencings or other hearings are needed. In some of the other districts, there is less travel time needed because many of those rural counties have only one service day a month.

Hoover-Grinde noted one of commonalities every district shared: Judges feel they don't have enough time during the workweek to do get their rulings completed.

'I take home work all the time,” Hoover-Grinde said. 'My kids are doing homework and I'm doing mine.”

Judge Mitchell Turner agreed, saying he usually 'brown bags” over lunch and runs into several judges working on any given Saturday at the courthouse.

Chief Judge Patrick Grady said he takes work home or also comes to the courthouse on weekends to have some 'quiet time” to write rulings or sometimes discuss issues with his fellow judges.

Grady said he wouldn't turn down more judges, but the district couldn't add support staff. And given the budget situation, he doesn't think that would be a possibility anyway. The 6th hasn't had more than 13 district judges.

'One of our biggest assets is our senior judges,” Grady said. 'We have a good group of senior judges who are very active. That's why it's such a loss to lose Senior Judge Thomas Koehler.”

Koehler, 79, retired in 2009 after 30 years and took senior status. But seniors can stay on the bench only until they are 80. Koehler turns 80 Saturday.

Grady said Judge Marsha Bergan will retire in September and her position won't be filled until 2018, and probably will be held open longer than the required six months.

Other states facing similar issues as Iowa - too much staff in some districts, not enough in others - are considering judicial redistricting: redrawing the boundaries by which judges and their staffs are divided.

Opinions vary whether judicial redistricting would benefit Iowa's court system. And in other states that have tried, those efforts have run into political hurdles.

'There are definitely imbalances, not just within districts but within (individual) judges' workloads as well,” said state Rep. Chip Baltimore, R-Boone, who chairs the Iowa House's committee on the courts.

Judicial redistricting could help even some of those workloads. But not everyone agrees whether that is needed in Iowa or whether it would work.

'I think, going forward, that it's definitely something that, given budget concerns, we have to look at,” Baltimore said. 'We can't have judges sitting around with a relatively light workload and other judges being completely overburdened, and they're all getting paid the same.”

Baltimore pointed to a bill that was passed by the Iowa House in 2016 that would have given the state's chief justice more flexibility in how judicial vacancies were filled. The aim of the legislation was to allow the chief justice to shift resources to other districts if there was a need. The bill received no action in the Iowa Senate.

The Iowa Supreme Court supported the proposal, state lobbying records show. No group registered against it.

Iowa does have a mechanism that allows some flexibility for the chief justice, who in the case of a vacancy can allocate a judicial assignment to another district where 'a substantial disparity exists.”

Such action was taken when judges retired in 2003 and 2005, a spokesman for the Iowa Supreme Court said.

In part because of that flexibility and because no district is deemed by the workload report to be more than one judge or one associate judge over-staffed, Iowa Chief Justice Mark Cady has no plan to recommend judicial redistricting, the spokesman said.

l Comments: (319) 398-8318; trish.mehaffey@thegazette.com

Erin Murphy of The Gazette-Lee Des Moines Bureau contributed.