By Judge Ketu Shah
Greetings, now that we have started 2024, I hope it is a prosperous and healthy year for you and your families. We have started the new year with a short legislative period and many proposed laws that will affect all of us. We have a superb team assisting us in advocating for the courts both at a local level and at a state level through the Superior Court Judges Association. Comprising one of our biggest concerns are changes in law that affect our operations and result in increased filings and calendars. An example of this was the change in the protection order laws last year. Through advocacy, we educated legislators about the impact this would have on our protection order calendars and they agreed to fund staffing temporarily to deal with the increased filings. We are grateful for that funding and have tracked the increase and it has been overwhelming. The number of cases has increased tremendously, and the length of hearings has also increased. Additionally, because of the increase of orders being issued, there has been a substantial increase in weapons surrender as required by the statute. This has had the additional ripple effect of massively increasing the weapons surrender calendar.
I give you this example as an illustration of how these changes in law impact the Court. There is additional legislation pending in other areas of law that will also impact the courts. I encourage King County Bar members that if you are involved with legislation advocacy, please also reach out to your state legislators to remind them to consider the impacts any changes have on the courts. Often it is assumed local funding will take care of court needs but as I mentioned in last month’s column, local funding is extremely stressed. The Executive and County Councils need to make difficult choices about funding priorities and although they are strong supporters of the courts, choices still need to be made.
King County Superior Court wants to be accessible and serve its community. To do that and ensure all parties have a fair day in court, we need to have the infrastructure to deal with new filings and new laws. I encourage all of you to remind your community leaders that the courts play a critical role, perhaps the most critical role, in ensuring folks have a place to go to resolve their grievances and disputes in a timely and fair manner.
As I mentioned, we will have two openings on our bench, and now a third opening will occur. Judge Segal has resigned his position and we wish him well in his new endeavors. I am working with the Governor’s Office to get new appointments and am hopeful by next month we will have a couple of these positions filled.
As always, we welcome feedback and conversation on how our Court can serve the King County Bar and the members of our community. Please reach out to further that conversation.
