Judiciary budget increases; St. Mary's judgeship request and juvenile caseload spike draw scrutiny

The subcommittee reviewed the Judiciary’s fiscal 2026 allowance on Feb. 17, 2025, where the Department of Legislative Services reported a $31.7 million increase (4.1%) over FY25 and recommended multiple reductions and reporting requirements. Jacob Polakove of the Department of Legislative Services told the committee the fiscal 2026 allowance reached “a total of $813,400,000,” and that the increase included funding for new positions, salary increases for judges and court staff, and security improvements at district court facilities.

Why it matters: DLS recommended abolishing five newly requested positions, including a circuit court judgeship for St. Mary’s County, citing DLS workload modeling and certification analysis; the judiciary pushed back, saying local trial patterns — including a sharp rise in contested jury trials — are not fully captured by the model and require an additional judgeship.

DLS recommended deleting the St. Mary’s judgeship and two positions that would support it, as well as two district court case managers. The judiciary accepted the deletion of the two case-manager positions but “respectfully disagree[d]” with deleting the three positions tied to a judgeship. Chief Justice Matthew Fader told the subcommittee, “We have experienced a 38% statewide increase in juvenile delinquency filings,” and stressed that the judiciary’s caseloads are driven by external filings and prosecutorial and local-system decisions.

Judge Joseph Stanelones, administrative judge for St. Mary’s County, described substantial increases in criminal jury trials and family merits hearings. He said contested criminal jury trials in St. Mary’s County rose significantly between calendar year 2019 and 2024, and that the court has expanded trial scheduling — using more calendar weeks and longer days — but still faces monthslong delays for scheduling family trial dates, with one-day trial openings sometimes not available until September.

Polakove and DLS also pressed the judiciary on several other areas: court performance metrics, problem solving courts, appointed attorney program costs and utilization, major IT projects, and vacancy/turnover assumptions. DLS recommended deleting the St. Mary’s judgeship, increasing assumed turnover for new positions to 25% (yielding a suggested reduction of $393,939), and adopting multiple committee narratives requesting annual and quarterly reports on performance measures, problem-solving courts, major IT projects, and the private home detention monitoring program.

The judiciary recommended selective acceptance and rejection of the DLS recommendations. On IT and license spending, State Court Administrator Judy Rupp warned that reductions could undermine system reliability and security: Rupp described completed milestones, including migration to a statewide electronic filing and case management system (MDEC). On problem solving courts and appointed attorney program questions, the judiciary and the chief judge of the district court said some requested detailed outcome data would require custom programming and manual review of thousands of cases and that the courts had already provided reports and would continue to work with DLS on report design.

Context and next steps: The DLS recommended multiple statutory-limit and appropriation adjustments that the General Assembly will consider during budget negotiations. The judgeship request for St. Mary’s County remains contested: DLS recommended abolishing it; the judiciary provided courtroom-level workload detail and urged that the General Assembly respect the judiciary’s judgeship certification process or allow reallocation authority. Several DLS reporting requests (on IT projects, PSCs, and home-detention monitoring) were accepted in part by the judiciary, which proposed clarifying the scope or the technical feasibility of certain requested data.