Courts ask state for budget boost
/
Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas proposed a $268.2 million budget increase for the court system’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget. Eagle file photo by Rob Abruzzese
By Jacob Kaye
Top officials in New York’s court system called on Albany to boost their budget next year by $268.2 million, bringing their total budget to $3 billion.
Ahead of the earnest start of budget season in January, Chief Judge Rowan Wilson and Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas outlined the Unified Court System’s budget proposal last week, calling for a nearly 10 percent increase.
Should their wish be fulfilled by the governor and state legislature, the budget would mark the second year in a row the court system saw an increase in funds after seeing several years of stagnant budgets following the pandemic.
A bulk of the new funds would go toward the court system’s core operations, including paying for new legally-mandated judgeships, contractual raises for court staff and new computers and other technology to further bring the state’s courts into the 21st Century.
The rest of the budget boost, should it eventually be approved, would go toward efforts to speed up cases and cut back on the court system’s backlog of cases in its criminal, civil, family and housing courts.
If this year’s budget negotiations are any indication of how next year’s budget dance will go for the courts, Wilson and Zayas will leave Albany with their pockets full.
The court system’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget, the first constructed by Wilson and Zayas, was effectively granted in full by Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature.
“We have built strong partnerships with the executive and legislative branches of government and believe they are aligned with our goals and vision,” said Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas. “We are eager to collaborate with them as we make every effort to pass our proposed budget to continue to develop a justice system that is fair and efficient and addresses the needs and concerns of our court users and the community.”
The new budget request largely builds on the previous budget, calling for increased spending in many of the same areas as the FY 2025 fiscal plan.
“After years of enduring austere budgets, in FY 2025, the governor and legislature made significant overdue restorations to the judiciary budget, authorized a measurable and much needed increase in judgeships and also increased judicial salaries to ensure competitiveness with the federal courts and with the private sector,” the budget request reads.
But the Fiscal Year 2026 budget request is also larger than the court leader’s last proposal.
For Fiscal Year 2025, Zayas and Wilson called for a $2.7 billion budget, a 5 percent increase from the year prior. This year’s request comes in 9.9 percent higher than Fiscal Year 2025.
One of the biggest expenses the courts said they’ll have in the upcoming year is paying the salaries of 43 new judges that were added to the court system through two different laws passed over the past two years.
The court system also carved out funds for contractual raises and benefits for non-judicial staff and cost-of-living adjustments for providers like Civil Legal Services Attorney for Child, Children’s Centers, Community Dispute Resolution Centers, Court Appointed Special Advocates and Center for Justice Innovation.
Zayas and Wilson also called for a little more than $66 million for new spending for court operations.
Included in that projection is $17.7 million for 10 new criminal court judges in New York City to “address backlogs and other case processing needs in the state’s busiest criminal court.”
The funding request also includes money to increase the per diem rate for jurors from $40 to $72 – the last time the rate increased was in 1998.
The money would also cover the cost of creating 75 new court attorney positions, 90 trial court operations positions, 10 support magistrate positions and 22 Appellate Department positions.
Also receiving new funding under the court officials’ proposal would be legal services providers and programs that offer alternative forms of justice, which Wilson highlighted during his first State of the Judiciary speech earlier this year.
“We should cease thinking about courts as places where a judge merely decides which party is right and which is wrong,” Wilson said in February. “Instead, we should think of the courts as similar to our other branches of government – institutions that attempt to make decisions that will improve the lives of those we serve.”
“Let's think of our courts as problem solvers, not solely as adjudicators of which party is right,” he added.
In that vein, the proposed budget includes $3 million to expand the court system’s alternative dispute resolution programs, $2 million to support an alternative to incarceration part in the Bronx and $300,000 for behavioral health services.
The budget also includes a number of proposed increases for civil legal services providers, who have been bleeding attorneys for a number of years as salaries and funding have stagnated and workloads have increased.
“We are grateful that the chief judge asked, listened, and heard what civil legal services – and our clients – are facing,” said Kristin Brown, the president of the New York Legal Services Coalition. “Civil legal aid clients include people escaping domestic violence, people facing homelessness, and people struggling to access stabilizing services and benefits such as social security disability, healthcare, and other resources they are entitled to. New York needs a healthy, stable, and sustainable civil legal services sector to meet these urgent needs.”
“We respectfully urge Governor Hochul and both houses of the legislature to support this critical investment in the final budget,” Brown added.
After submitting the proposal last week, Zayas will appear before the state legislature in January for the Senate and Assembly’s annual budget hearing on the judiciary.
