Vermont Bar Association debates court changes
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By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau - Published: September 26, 2009
FAIRLEE – Their clients may not yet realize the enormity of the changes coming to Vermont's courts, but lawyers around the state do.
Friday's Vermont Bar Association annual meeting at the Lake Morey Resort was one of the largest in the group's history, if not the largest of all.
What brought lawyers from St. Albans and Bennington to Fairlee on the Connecticut River? Hearing about – and in some cases arguing against – proposed changes for the court system. Those changes, being considered in part to save money and in part to provide a more nimble administrative oversight for the courts, include the possibility of consolidating courts in smaller counties like Grand Isle and Essex.
Those ideas were far from getting universal acclaim at the gathering of more than 300 lawyers.
"I am appalled at the recommendation that the courts in Grand Isle and Essex County be closed," said George Spear, a veteran lawyer with four decades of practice behind him. "To make the people of Grand Isle County travel to St. Albans … or to Chittenden County is essentially going to deny justice to them."
But the lawyers and judges who gathered to talk about the ideas in what they called a town hall meeting were not in agreement that the court changes – prompted in part by declining state budgets – were a bad idea.
"We live in a reality of finite resources," attorney Sam Hoar Jr. said. The attorneys objecting to the court alterations have to be careful not to let their "wonderful ideals" of keeping courts close to those served by them get in the way of seeing reality, he said. "Let's be real too," he said. "It costs more."
Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Reiber, one of the forces behind the commission studying the future of the court, said after the discussion that in some ways the public and the lawyers who attended the meeting did not fully understand the reasons and the goals of the study.
"It is very difficult to explain the issue in a way that everybody understands," he said. Just saving money by consolidating probate courts or reducing the role of the Grand Isle and Essex courts is only a small part of the idea, he said.
Right now courts are administered in part by the justices of the Vermont Supreme Court as the heads of the judiciary and in part by side judges as county officers (who will remain in charge of the county-owned court buildings).
The final recommendation by the group looking at the courts' future is expected in October.
Environmental Court Judge Thomas Durkin said at the Vermont Bar Association meeting that the question was not whether the courts – with a roughly $35 million annual budget now – were going to spend less, but how they were going to deal with having less to spend.
"We are going to be forced to operate a judicial system with fewer funds," he said. "The stark reality is that the process will change."
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