Humboldt Superior Court Presiding Judge Kelly Neel responds to County Staff report regarding courthouse security and screening

 

I had mentioned that I would be doing a separate post with Humboldt Superior Court's response regarding the courthouse security on the Humboldt County BOS agenda item I reported about this weekend. I spoke with both Humboldt Superior Court Presiding Judge Kelly Neel and Humboldt Superior Court CEO Meara Hattan.

A response to me just now was also sent to LOCO's Ryan Burns.

Humboldt Superior Court Response:

Good afternoon to you both,

As you are aware, the BoS is scheduled to hear an agenda item related to Courthouse weapons screening tomorrow. 

While I believe the staff report is essentially accurate, I don’t believe it was able to provide some context that I believe would be helpful.

There is an MOU between the HCSO and the Court that was entered into in 2012 and signed post-enactment of Realignment, but appears to have been written before the enactment as it makes no reference to the vast funding alterations made by realignment.  I could locate no historical record to verify my belief, but given the language, that’s what seems to make sense to me. 

The Court agreed to pay the County all funds received via Entrance Screening Funds.  This does not exist post realignment (or at least it doesn’t exist now and I cannot determine when it was last a fund).  Realignment transferred funding streams to the Counties to provide to the Sheriff offices as a Trial Court Security budget item.

The current screening providers, as I understand, have been functioning month-to-month as the contract period has long lapsed.  The HCSO sought requests for proposals for security screening and the bids came back – and it would have almost, if not fully, doubled the monthly expense to the Court based on the MOU.  That’s when we discovered, the Court does not receive any Entrance Screening Funds.

We have been in discussions with the HCSO/CAO office re: are there any solutions that can be reached, but so far, we’ve been unable to come to any agreements on how screening services could be reimagined.

The Sheriff can outsource and that has worked fine for years, it just so happens, increasing costs are making this a much more difficult endeavor.

We firmly believe that weapons screening is really an essential element of overall courthouse security and we are hopeful that something other than simply eliminating it will be up for continued discussion.  Jurors, county employees, court employees, numerous county department employees, community members seeking assistance from any county office housed here, victims of crime, witnesses and the like all access our multi-use building.

I’m sorry not to send individually, I’m just running out of time today.  I had reached out to Mr. Chiv after someone sent me his post this weekend and Ryan reached out to Meara.

I just wanted to make sure your readers understand this isn’t a simple matter and the Court continues to want to work with our justice partners for a resolution.

Warm regards,

Kelly Neel

In a second email, Judge Neel said:

"Ms. Hattan was just able to give me an update re: our increase would have been an average of 10k (more or less) as it changes from month to month given staffing levels; this is based on current staffing levels which are not necessarily the same as actual staffing levels."