Warns turnover among judicial branch employees has reached ‘alarming’ rate
By Bruce Schreiner
Associated Press
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — With his retirement looming, Kentucky’s chief justice began his closing arguments Tuesday in a long-running quest to win a substantial, across-the-board pay raise for judicial workers.
Testifying before a key House panel, Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. presented his plan for a flat $10,000 salary increase for fulltime judicial employees and a $5,000 raise for part-time workers. It would apply to all judicial employees as well as elected justices, judges and circuit court clerks.
In making his case, Minton warned that turnover among judicial branch employees has reached an “alarming” rate because of inadequate pay. He said salaries for Kentucky judges have sunk to the bottom nationally, leaving the state’s judges feeling “discouraged and undervalued.”
That makes it difficult to lure the best attorneys to leave successful law practices to seek judgeships, he said, warning bluntly that “the future of a high-quality bench is at stake.”
“We’re on the verge of a tipping point if we don’t move quickly to rectify the pay inequities that have plagued the judicial branch for decades,” Minton told the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee. “We’ve been discussing pay parity for years. And frankly, we are running out of time.”
Minton said his “salary parity plan” is his top priority for the state’s next two-year judicial branch budget. The pay plan would cost about $40 million per year, the committee was told. The judicial branch spending measure is pending in the Republican-dominated legislature.
It was perhaps Minton’s last appearance before the powerful House committee as chief justice. He opted not to seek reelection to the state’s high court in this year’s elections.
“I have a lot of heart invested in this,” Minton said of the proposed pay raises. “I have absolutely nothing to gain myself personally from this request.”
The judicial branch makes up only about 3% of the state budget, with a majority of its funding covering salaries, Minton said. But judicial branch salaries are about 15% to 20%, less than those in the executive and legislative branches, he said.
“Unless we significantly bump up our entire salary scale, we’ll always be chasing the higher salaries being offered by the executive and legislative branches,” Minton told the committee.
Judicial offices are struggling to retain employees because of the low pay, the chief justice said. Turnover rates are reaching about 40% annually in urban areas and for “critical frontline positions” such as pretrial services specialists, he said.
“We’ve lost over one-third of our workforce – about 1,000 employees – in the last four years,” he said. “That means one-third of our employees have less than four years of experience with the court system.”
The ability to hire is especially dire in such statewide programs as pretrial services, specialty courts and family and juvenile services, he said.
“For several of these positions, we’ve had no applicants and some who do apply don’t show up for the interview or refuse the offer,” Minton said.
Republican Rep. Jason Nemes said the pay raises are needed “from the bottom up.” Nemes, an attorney, said not many lawyers are willing to take a pay cut to become a judge, and as a result he said he worries that “the quality is lessening” on the bench.
“I’m very worried,” Nemes said. “When we look at our Bill of Rights, those are just paper rights. They mean nothing without a man or a woman behind them, without a judge ready to enforce them.”
