Gongwer News Service
A $7.2 million ongoing funding request in the 2025-26 fiscal year budget recommendations floated by Governor Gretchen Whitmer would help Michigan’s judiciary get closer to a unified court system with readily shareable case data, Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Clement told a House appropriations subcommittee on Thursday.
Clement and Chief Court of Appeals Judge Michael Gadola presented Whitmer’s budget requests for the judiciary and their respective courts before the House Appropriations Corrections and Judiciary Subcommittee .
The judiciary is seeking the money to help fund the Judicial Information System expansion once the buildout of the system is completed. Tom Boyd, the head of the State Court Administrative Office, told Gongwer News Service this week in an interview that the judiciary estimates it will need $38 million (or more adjusted to inflation) to operate the system once every court in the state is on board. Tom Boyd, the head of the State Court Administrative Office, told Gongwer News Service last week in an interview that the judiciary estimates it will need $38 million (or more adjusted to inflation) to operate the system once every court in the state is on board. The buildout, which is currently ongoing, has $150 million already invested since work begin in 2021. Since then, SCAO has onboarded 250 of 302 courts statewide, has committed $65 million to contracts with vendors and is working on allocating the other $85 million in projects with less than 20 percent of courts that still need to be added.
Clement relayed much of that information and the history of the project to the subcommittee chaired by Rep. Bradley Slagh (R-Zeeland) on Thursday. She said her main goal before she steps down in April is to earn appropriators support for the funding so the judiciary can “keep this important project on track.”
“These funds allow us to scale up our staffing to provide support for the expanded system and maintain on an ongoing basis the additional computing resources necessary for a larger system,” Clement said.
The chief justice noted that while the House and Senate appropriated the money needed to build the system, the request for $38 million was not approved.
On the system itself, Clement said JIS was the appropriate system to be using for every court, an assertion backed by third-party experts.
Of the remaining courts to be onboarded, Clement said 18 are in the mix and that JIS is engaging in discussions with those venues. The system also has already received commitments from seven of the 52 courts left.
The key challenge is that those courts are some of the most complex and utilized systems in the state, and data migration hurdles abound, Clement added.
Aside from unifying a historically decentralized court system, Clement said the savings from getting every court on the same case management program were palpable.
“We estimate the savings, and this is just an estimate at this point, to be more than $700,000 annually. Remember, this would be annual savings and just from three courts out of 302 state courts,” Clement said. “A statewide CMS eliminates costs to the local funding unit of licensing a for-profit vendor, it eliminates or reduces the local IT needs for maintenance, replacement of costly servers, data, backup, operating system updates and support. It provides courts with standard, standardized checks and balances that guide a court through a case life cycle according to court rules and statutes.”
Clement added that other case management systems don’t prevent courts from violating court rules or statutes, but a statewide case management system could easily update all courts when statutes or court rules change.
Rep. Greg Markkanen (R-Hancock) asked how many other states have a shared case management system. Clement said that it was hard to answer but that the court could provide a statistic to his office later. The difficulty in determining that, Clement said, was the fact that many states have a unified system whereas Michigan does not.
Rep. Amos O’Neal (D-Saginaw) asked what scaling up in terms of staffing would like for SCAO to operate the system. Clement said it would depend on whether the system would continue to get one-time funding in each budget year or if ongoing funding was approved by appropriations in this round.
“When we look at the ongoing funding, as we are bringing more courts onto the system, we are scaling up appropriately to be able to serve those additional courts,” Clement said. “So when we come to you every year asking for whatever that number is, this year is larger because it wasn’t fully funded in the last few cycles, it is intended to only ask for the amount that we need to be able to serve the courts that we are bringing on or anticipating bringing on, with the goal being that at the end of this again, in 2022 dollars, $38 million is what we are anticipating will be the cost to run the entire system into the future.”
Rep. Cam Cavitt (R-Cheboygan) asked Clement about efforts to reform trial court funding. The chief justice said SCAO has a number of work groups meeting figuratively around the clock involving stakeholders from across the state.
“Anytime we have had a legislator or other individual that is interested, we have taken their name and added them to our distribution list,” Clement said. “We get a very detailed update monthly on exactly what is going on with all of the work groups.”
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