Good afternoon. This is House of Judiciary Subcommittee. I call this meeting to House Finance to order. Let the record reflect that it is 12.02 p.m. Friday, February 6th, 2026, today present. We have representative cop and myself.
from legislative information office.
Please remember to mute your cell phones.
Sub-community minors have been provided
to all committee members and documents have
been posted to the biases.
Are there any questions about these?
Seeing none, we will continue.
And we were joined by Representative Gray
and Representative Underwood.
1202.
Today, the judiciary will present their FY27 budget request.
Our presenters are Noah Klein, Associate Counsel for the Alaska Court System,
Rhonda McCleod, Chief Financial Officer for Alaska court system.
Mr. Klein and Mrs. McGaleo, please join us on record and begin your presentation.
Good afternoon, Chair Jimmy, members of the committee.
My name is Noah Klein for the record,
and I am Associate Counsel at the Alaska Court System.
And on the phone, she's not here with us today,
but on phone we should have Rhonda McLeod,
the Court Systems CFO,
and she'll be able to answer any technical numbers,
questions that I might need a lifeline for.
First of all, I just want to say thank you
for having us to present our FY27 budget.
We'll start with our FLI26 budget,
just so the Committee's aware of where we are.
And before I dive into our actual requests from this current fiscal year and our request for the upcoming fiscal
year, I just want to briefly remind you of who we are.
And I know this is the judiciary subcommittee and most of you are on the Judiciary Committee, so you know what the courts do.
But for a quick reminder, you
know, when you think of the court's most people tend to think
of judges and we do have about a hundred when
you include magistrate judges, we
do
have
about
a
hundred
judge
positions
But we're actually funded for 780 positions and the vast majority of those positions are clerical staff
And those are the people who keep the court system running and actually allow our judges to do what they do
So I just wanted to make sure that the committee's aware the subcommittees aware that
The vast minority of court's system appoint employees are range 16 or lower
So we aren't filled with lawyers and judges and mostly high high-paid positions
And then
I think it's important to remember where we are in the state.
So the court system has a footprint all over Alaska.
We're broken up into four judicial districts.
We currently have 38 locations with courthouses.
And of course, like anywhere else in
the State, Anchorage is our largest footprint.
We have both a superior court, a trial court courthouse
there, as well as an appellate courthouse in Anchorage.
but then throughout the state in all four judicial districts,
we also have smaller facilities where we only have one judge.
We only had one judicial officer running a small one-room courthouse,
so that makes us unique compared to the rest of the State.
Finally, I just want to quickly mention what we're doing,
and I know this isn't on the slides.
The slides are just limited to our budget,
but I want just talk about who we are.
So we have 90,000 plus case filings this year in FY26.
and that's broken down about 70,000 filings in the district court,
20, 000 plus filings and the Superior Court, and then we have appeals of course.
And we're interacting with Alaskans in many, many ways.
We have thousands of Alascans, about 5,00 a year serve on juries,
another 15, to 20 thousand show up for jury service,
even if they don't actually get onto jurries,
so they're there showing up at the courthouse and being involved with the court process.
We have 10,000s of forms accessed every year.
We had millions of visits to our website.
And we have also millions
of searches on court view, which is our online database
where you can search court-related information.
So, and finally, I know the committee
and most committees are usually interested
in therapeutic courts, so just a note,
we had almost 500 participants
in the therapeutic court this year across the state.
So this slide shows our UGF increments for FY26.
This is what the court system actually requested for
FY 26.
And you can see there's an asterisk in the first increment.
I'd like to get to that at the end of the slide, if possible.
But if there are any questions, of course, feel free to task.
And so our first incremental request last year was $534,000
for our operating and maintenance expenses.
And that's really the day-to-day expenses
of keeping our facilities open.
generally seems like a pretty simple concept, right? We, you know, we're just asking for,
for maintenance money or utility money, but it's actually pretty complex just because of our
ownership structure across the state. So in our, in approximately 40 facilities,
we own about a third of them, and then about 1 third are owned by the
private leases and facilities where we might be leasing from the municipal government.
And so across those three types of facilities, we have different kinds of costs.
So for example, the facilities we own,
we're going to have utilities costs that we are paying.
We're gonna have landscaping costs or snow removal.
This is Alaska, of course.
We have snow-removal costs we were paying,
but then we also pay the executive branch for service level agreements
in the facility that DOT maintains for us.
Or we pay occupancy agreements to the state in those facilities that
we occupy, but they're state-owned facilities.
I believe we have a question with Representative Underwood.
Thank you, Chair Jimmy.
I'm through the chair.
Thank for being here, Mr. Klein.
I am just curious before we get into this too much.
Is the budget that we are looking at right now,
is this the original budget
that the Chief Justice approved
and that was submitted to the governor?
Through the Chair to Representative underwood?
So this is our FY26 request,
and yes, we will highlight that.
What?
the legislature received from the governor last year and again this year what the
legislature receive from governor is not the operating budget that the Alaska Supreme Court
approved. And so our process is that
the Alaska Supreme court comes up with what they think the court system's operating needs are
and they create a budget request which is my job to present but we submit that budget
request to OMB with the expectation and hope that that request would be
pass through for the legislature's consideration follow follow I don't know
if it is customary but is there any way that we would be able to get a copy of
what your initial submission was I'm just trying to
get an actuarial of what the courts are saying that they need versus the
budget that were looking at through the chair.
That has not been the historic practice, but I believe moving forward
That is our goal. Our goal is to submit our budget request directly to legislative finance
And we can do that we could send this committee or any individual legislator our
Budget that way we actually submitted this year
If that's what you'd like. Thank you, and I think we do have a question from Representative Gray
Thank You through the chair to mr. Klein
We are anticipating moving out the bill today to add a judge in Palmer
And that I think it's going to be about a million dollars.
So I'm just, I know that we had to do that because of the statutory requirement.
We have to pass a bill, but am I wrong to acknowledge that really everything needs
a millionaire added to it because ultimately that's what we need to
do through the chair to Representative Gray.
When you're considering the entire fiscal picture for the state for FY 27,
Yes, the fiscal note with any bill that includes a fiscal
note would be included as part of that picture.
So when we get to our request for this year, it is for
less than a million dollars for our increment requests,
but you are correct that there will be a cost if the legislature
chooses to give us the judge that we're requesting. There will
be, I believe, $740,000 cost, but Ms. Mead could correct me on
that number when she's with the Judiciary Committee in an hour.
Please continue, Mr. Klein.
Of course, thank you.
So again, I talked a little bit about just this.
The reason I went so detailed in that maintenance
and operations increment is because it shows up frequently.
We frequently come back asking for maintenance
and operation and the reason we're doing it
is we are maintaining almost 40 facilities.
And it's up.
Somewhat moving target every year because we have different costs that fit into that piece
So for example in FY 26
250,000 of the 534,00 that we asked for was for an expected least increased cost in Utgiavik
Well, that lease ended up coming in $50, 000 less. So our ultimate request this year
Recognizes that change we don't we just keep asking for more
The second increment that we requested last year was $365,000 for the Court Visitor Program.
And just as a reminder to the subcommittee.
Court visitors participate in protective person proceedings.
These are guardianships and conservatorships.
And essentially, they're an investigator for the court.
They help the Court make fact determinations
about whether or not a protective arrangement
is appropriate and in situations
where there already is a protected arrangement,
court visitors help
the courts decide whether that arrangement
is inappropriate to continue moving forward.
And so in FY23, this program came over
to the Courts from the Office of Public Advocacy.
And the court system had no concerns about that.
It made sense to us that these visitors
are reporting directly to the Court.
And on some level, they're not in the same position.
For example, as the public guardian at Opa.
And so having them within the courts,
we had not concerns with that, but when the program came over,
it turned out that it's costing us more
than it had cost output around the Program.
And there are a number of reasons why we think that's the case.
because the visitors are directly involved
with the court system, which is who they're reporting to.
I think we have potentially higher expectations
than were the expectations in the past.
And then on top of that,
the Court system had identified a backlog
of some of the reviews that these visitors
were supposed to be doing.
And so as we climb out of
that backlog, we had cost increases.
We have a question from Representative Cop.
Thank you through the chair, Mr. Klein of thank you. So on the note of these I think you called them investigator positions
to check in on
people who are under
guardianship or conservative ship
are those
Benefited state positions or those like contract labor positions where they just get a cash salary
To do the job. How is the court managing that program?
Through the chair to representative cop. I appreciate the question. They are contractors if I wasn't clear
So they have historically when they were at the office of public advocacy and now here with the court system.
They're contractor positions, and so
they
Get there's hourly rates that they get based on experience for for their work
And you know we provide minimal training, but but they are independent of the Court System
But they do serve a role
Helping the judge make the determination sure thank thank you. Thank you, and before we continue mr
Planet I'd like to acknowledge our representative meeting has joined us at 1212
Thank You chair Jimmy
So the third UGF increment we requested for this current fiscal year was
92,400 dollars for balance funding for two positions within the therapeutic courts. These are
competency calendaring staff.
One does this statewide, and another one does
this just in Anchorage.
But the goal of these positions is to check
the competancy calendar and make sure that people
aren't languishing before their competencies determinations
are made.
And historically, these physicians
have been predominantly funded with mTOR money.
So these are mental health trust authority recommended
positions and about $158,000 every year.
comes from the mental health trust.
And this $92,000 that we asked for last year
was the balance of the funding for those positions.
Over time, their benefits went up,
their salaries went out.
The final.
increment that we asked for last year was the $170,000 for RSA's for the
therapeutic courts and RSA stands for reimbursable services agreements.
Basically the entire therapeutic court's budget is within the judiciary.
The legislature made that decision about 15 years ago that it would be
good accounting practice to see all of the cost of therapeutic
courts in one place. And so there are employees in the
therapeutic arts who are executive branch employees that
And so like everyone else, all state employees over the past few years have received raises benefit costs have gone up over
the last few. Those costs increased for these people as well. And
so this wasn't any sort of programmatic expansion. It was simply the increased cost of paying for those positions at
Division of Behavioral Health, for example.
And I spoke.
Thank you. I spoke about the the asterisk already in response to representative under what's questions. All I'll move on unless there are any questions
This slide just shows what we did in fact receive from our UGF increments last year
So we received out of that five hundred thousand dollars
We had requested for operating and maintenance expenses the legislature. We received two hundred fifty thousand
we did receive the full RSA amount for those therapeutic court positions as well as the
full balance amount of those competency calendaring positions.
And then this slide just identifies essentially what we would view as short funding for the
judiciary last year.
These are costs that we had that were definitely going to incur that didn't receive funding
for.
the same thing but they're broken up because 113,000 the legislature didn't fund and the
remaining 170, 000 the governor vetoed so the legislator chose to fund us at a certain level
and governor vetoed our operating maintenance increment to a lower level and then we didn t receive
that funding for the court visitors as well and so unless there are any questions i'll just
with that short funding.
Seeing none, please continue, Mr. Klein.
Sure.
So on the operating and maintenance side
from those couple of increments,
basically, like I mentioned earlier,
our Utgiavik lease cost came in less than we expected it to.
And then we also experienced some one-time savings last year
in some of our operating maintenance expenses,
so we were able to cover some other costs with it.
Our Hooper Bay Courthouse wasn't open
when we expect it it be just for maintenance issues,
the cost of having a facility open, and then some of our costs to DOT didn't come in where
we expected them to.
They were lower as well.
And so we had about $100,000 last year and one time savings.
The remaining $180,00 that we didn t receive, we re not.
In response to not getting all of our operating money for facilities, we have no plans to close courthouses. That's not something we're looking to do
Basically, will look to our vacancy savings to the extent possible for that funding. So we are currently funded for a 7% vacancy rate
We've been doing very well. We would say with our recruitment over the last year and a half
We have been hovering around that rate.
We dropped down from about 10% a few years ago and we were very close to a budgeted rate
savings to cover this cost that we have to pay for, right? We have
to paper our facilities. We would potentially hold positions open
for a short period of time in additional 15 days, for example,
to to attain some additional savings, to
pay-for for these costs. And then moving to the court
visitors, there are a couple of strategies that
we're going to try to implement to address this shortfall.
The first one, again, is if we half-to-we'll go to make
First, we're going to look into potentially...
slowing down our rollout of coming out of that backlog of three reviews already we weren't going
to do them all at once we just don't have the amount of visitors to them on top of
that if you do everything at one's on a three-year cycle then three years from now you're going to be
running into a massive ebb and flow situation where there's a huge amount
of work every three year and it won't be steady so we can potentially slow down climbing out
And then we'll also look at potential training
or just additional experience for the visitors
if there's some way that we can get them
to be more efficient, as well as potentially
are there options for judicial training.
For example, that see if judges can
get visitors out of cases sooner.
See if they're a way visitors can serve their role,
but not stay in cases as long as they have.
So, this slide just shows our budget from last year compared to what our adjusted base
is compared what's the governors in the executive branch budget bill.
And so, our adjust base is about $4 million above what the budget was last
year.
And the reason for that is all of our employees got a two and a half percent salary increase.
This was in accordance with legislation that the legislature passed a couple of years ago.
And then the cost for none of our employees are in unions.
So I know that the healthcare cost is different
depending on where employees
are, but our healthcare costs for employees
went up $130 per employee per month.
So that was a significant, almost a million dollar increase
in our adjusted base for the Alaska air costs.
And that's the same cost, that increase that you would see
for your employees at the legislature, for example.
Moving from our adjusted base to the executive branch budget,
they look identical.
There is a single increment for $100,000
non-general fund increment that's
in the Executive Branch budget.
So we had asked for more, as you'll see in
the next slide, but the FY27 gov is basically
identical to The Adjusted Base Budget.
Thank you.
You may continue.
This slide shows our limited UGF increments this year.
And again, these are the increments that we are asking for.
We will make sure we get them to Representative Underwood and the committee in the actual form that
we requested them, but you can see here what we were asking
for, so we had asked for that same operating and maintenance
increment that comes up frequently.
We have a $700,000 request this
year, again $280,00 of that approximately would be covering the things that
our recurring costs that we didn't get funded for last year,
and then on top of that, our operating maintenance costs
have gone up.
You'll see right below that.
We actually have a subtraction from our original request.
We base our request part of it on numbers, estimates
that were received from DOT for our service level agreements,
and those estimates are a couple of years old.
And we finally got the actual number
during this budget process.
And so we're lowering our requests by $100,000 to $8,
reflect that the actual number is $100,000 less than the only other operating increment that we
that were seeking this year that this Supreme Court decided to ask for and this what we would
consider a very conservative operating budget request is again the balance funding for those
two competency calendaring positions and last year it was $92, 000 for the balanced funding. This year
Again, tied into the raises and benefit increases that all employees in the state have received and those are benefited positions within the therapeutic courts
We have a question from representative great. Thank you. I'm through the chair. Do we keep it? They're like an average cost per case and I am curious about
and also comparing that to a felony case versus a misdemeanor case.
Mr. Klein.
Through the chair to Representative Gray,
I am not aware of an average cost per case that we keep.
I think that would be a pretty difficult metric
to really reflect what we do and where our costs are.
Therapeutic court cases are more expensive if you just subtract the 500 a little bit less
therapeutic court participants from the $10 million budget of the therapeutic courts,
but I would also be loath not to say that there are other benefits of therapeutic
courts and that's for the legislature to decide the value of those benefits. For example, keeping
potentially fewer people are incarcerated as a result of having therapeutic
courts or there's less recidivism as the result
right? Beds in facilities. I'm not an expert on corrections costs, and I don't want to speak to
their costs. But we all know that beds have a cost. Did that answer your question?
And so I kind of got off script a little bit. Thank you, Representative Underwood, which it's
great. Just I just wanted to, for one last time, highlight again that, you know, what we asked for
And we feel fairly strongly as the courts that the legislature should see our full request.
We think both for separation of powers, reasons as a coordinate branch of government and also
just respect for a court and a branch government that legislature would see the Supreme Court's
actual budget requests.
Now that being said, the Legislature of course has the ability to fund us how they choose.
The Legislature has power to the purse and the governor would still have the opportunity
got passed by the legislature.
We just feel that our initial request
should be seen by legislature,
and a final of just comment, it's not our budget,
but within the judiciary,
there are two other independent agencies,
so it was the Judicial Council
and the Commission on Judicial Conduct.
And as far as I know, this year was
the first year that their increments
were also not included in the executive branch budget.
Please continue, Mr. Klein.
This is my last slide, like I said,
So hopefully this would be pretty simple, not complicated, but these are just our non-UGF requests.
And this year, this 158,000, again,
this is the other half of those two competency calendaring positions.
This is MTR funding for those positions and mental health trust funding.
This year this funding is part of the base budget. Last year it wasn't,
And we're asking for a single new position,
that is a trust recommended position.
So this is not general funded.
It would be for behavioral health administrator position
the trust recommend that we
have a position like this that essentially the goal of this position would be to coordinate
between the court system, the justice agencies, community stakeholders, just to come up with ways
that we can better serve people involved in the just a system who are having behavioral health
difficulties. And the goals of the position ultimately would come with system-wide programs. So
not just we'll deal with someone in a criminal case in one way, in civil case,
criminal cases, civil cases strategies to help serve people who are involved in the
justice system, who have behavioral health difficulties.
Thank you. Through the chair, and this is not necessarily something you can answer, it's
we learned in our hearing about adding the judge and Palmer that even with the
judge added that the average number of cases in Palmer would still be higher than the
average for the state. So it doesn't seem like enough and I feel like the court system
always comes in and presents an extraordinarily conservative budget. And I understand that you're
An executive is line item vetoing $100,000 here and there.
But I just want to say that even with this short meaning
of 30 minutes, we spent 30 min on your budget,
which by my calculations is 0.016% of the Alaska State
budget.
To say, that another way, if we divided the Alaskas State
budget into 100, 000 parts, the court system
would be 16 of those parts.
16, 100 thousandth of The State budget
I just am saying it.
I think that you guys ask for too little.
I have lots of news stories about our criminal justice system moving extraordinarily slowly.
I stated that we need more prosecutors and more defenders so that they have less cases
be able to move their cases forward more quickly,
but when I said that publicly,
I got a lot of feedback from people saying,
well, we're gonna need more courts
and we gonna more judges
and you can't just have more prosecutors and defenders.
So, mainly I'm making a comment.
I appreciate that you guys come in
and ask for these very tiny amounts of money to continue
and even when you ask
for those tiny little increments that
you get feed out, but.
You're not asking for enough, and we know it.
Thank you.
Thank You for sharing your, that's Representative Gray.
I really appreciate it, is there anything else you'd like to finish?
It's through the chair to Representative gray.
I'd just like say we are very appreciative of your support for the courts and
we appreciate your recognition that we do try to be conservative in our budget
request and try be cognizant of where the state is financially.
To your point about, and by no means do I want to correct,
I don't have any correction or anything like that to say,
but to your points about criminal cases,
honestly with limited funding, it's the other cases.
And I know you've heard this from the court system before,
but it is the cases that tend to fall behind
when we don t have sufficient funding
or we do not have enough funding.
If we, or resources I should say.
obligations we do we through our resources at those statutory and
constitutional cases where there are requirements to to address them in a
specific period of time. And we have a question from representative cop. Thank
you through the chair Mr. Klein the so back to the governor's veto 170,800 to
the trial courts it looks like that was inflationary increases to lease
You mentioned that you own a third of your facilities,
you lease a 3rd of them from the state,
and you have some other partnerships going on,
probably with the private sector on the remainder.
Do any of those, you know,
which one of these partners is driving
the inflationary increases to leases and utilities
and service payments, is evenly spread.
I'm trying to figure it out
You know, are you falling behind on your reimbursable service agreements to the executive branch or you know what?
Where is this going?
Through the chair to representative cop, um, I would defer to miss McLeod on the specifics of where
Individual dollars are going, but I think a general answer would be that we are seeing
increases in our private leases and also under private, I would consider municipal government
entities that own facilities that we're in. So those would all be, in my mind, private
leases as opposed to the state owned facility. That's that one third. We have CPI increases
built into many of our leases. Before the lease expires, we have the option to renew.
but there is a consumer price index inflationary adjustment.
And so those exist in our leases.
And oftentimes we would be much worse off
if we tried to renegotiate those leases,
we probably wouldn't get as good a deal.
So we pay those CPI increases.
Then we also do see increases in costs
for our operating agreements with the executive branch
and with our occupancy agreements for facilities,
those costs do go up over time as well.
Thank you.
I just wanted to put it out there.
Ms. McLeod, did you want to add anything to this, if you're with us?
Through the chair, this is Rhonda McChod, Chief Financial Officer for the court system.
Mr. Klein, adequate, he explained it very well.
I do want you to highlight one thing, though.
We've recently been negotiating contracts that were older and needed to be rewritten.
Contractors of course are experiencing the increases due to, you know, their cost increases specifically with no plowing and energy costs. So we are, we have had significant increases in those two areas of our services for the lease to end on properties.
Thank you, Mrs. McLeod for that. Is there any other questions?
Thank.
Mr. Klein and Ms. McLeod for giving your presentation and giving us a good report. Are there any final questions?
Seeing none before we close out, I would like to give land acknowledgments to the Akukan Takukantribe, the southeastern indigenous
for allowing us to conduct business for our beautiful state of Alaska,
Goyana, and we will be adjourned. I do not see any notes of when our next meeting is,
but we'll keep you guys updated.
I will call out the meeting at 1232. Thank you.