government idiots? is that a good word for this? of course the bottom line is $revenue$ not justice Original Article Justice slow at overcrowded Mesa court Jammed facility gets by in pinch Jim Walsh The Arizona Republic Mar. 23, 2005 12:00 AM Gwen Wilson works in a sea of 53,000 files jammed into a room at Mesa Municipal Court. There are four workers but room for three desks. "It's stressful. It's hard to keep things in order," said Wilson, 52. "My co-worker has tendinitis from pulling out files. Sometimes, we misplace things for lack of space." Clerks rub shoulders with each other at a crowded front counter to collect fines from the public. Because there's no room, 10 other clerks work from home to enter criminal complaints into a database. "You don't have enough room, and you have all these papers," said Melissa DuPree, 37, a clerk. "It gets hectic at times." Overcrowding is a fact of life at the state's third busiest municipal court, with little hope for relief until a new facility approved by voters in a bond issue is built and opened. That's at least three years away. "I don't know how they've been working in that environment since 1984," when the building opened, said City Councilman Mike Whalen, a former assistant police chief. The court has less space than when it opened since the city built the crime lab in the basement, Whalen said. Defendants wait hours in the jail court and sometimes spend an extra night in jail at city expense because there is no room to add another judge. Mesa police Lt. Brian Kozak, who supervises the city's 27-cell lockup, said the logjam is so severe that defendants sometimes wait two weeks in county jail, costing the city $47 a day, to make a court appearance in the overwhelmed jail court. Kozak proposes building an arraignment center in the new court building modeled after a Pima County facility, where defendants can get cases settled in one day. Although court officials say 93 percent of visitors are served within 15 minutes, some wait considerably longer during busy periods like Friday afternoons, because there are no additional windows where clerks can accept fines, deputy court administrator Lenny Montanaro said. Cases later back up when defendants fail to show for court appearances, Montanaro said. Arrest warrants are pending against 24,188 defendants. An additional 11,926 defendants have failed to pay fines. "We have the knowledge to run the court efficiently. We just can't," said Presiding Judge Matt Tafoya, referring to lack of space. "We're in a submarine. We have no place to grow." Mesa voters and city officials acknowledged the problem a year ago. They approved a $50 million bond issue to build two new buildings, a new police crime lab and a courthouse. But the City Council delayed issuing the bonds because of concerns about whether Mesa has adequate funds to pay the interest and operating costs, City Manager Mike Hutchinson said. "We'll have a plan in place," Hutchinson said. He said it would be in place by late April when the council starts considering the budget. Whalen said the space shortage dates back to the defeat of a previous bond issue in 2000 for city buildings. Until the city can complete the building project, Thomas said, "we have to use our imagination and creativity." Those creative measures include dismissing unpaid fines from court ledgers if the defendant was found guilty at least 10 years ago, and every possible means of collecting the debt was unsuccessful for at least five years. "There's a point where you say, 'If the case is 15 years old, how long do you keep going on it?' " Tafoya said. The result was that $635,328 in unpaid fines, stemming from 1,938 cases, was written off as bad debt, Montanaro said. But the busy court, visited by about 250,000 people a year, also collected more than $11.7 million in fines and more than $1.3 million in bonds during 2004, he said.