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19th Judicial District Court warns deferred maintenance, staff and state-case costs strain parish budget
Summary
Miss Gibbons told the Metro Council the 19th JDC relies on roughly $6 million in city-parish funding for salaries and faces significant courthouse maintenance needs; court leaders say unpaid state-filed cases and appellate delays create an annual local burden estimated at $750,000–$1,000,000.
Miss Gibbons, speaking for the nineteenth Judicial District Court, told the Metro Council the court serves all of East Baton Rouge Parish and is largely supported by two city-parish budget lines: salaries and benefits (about $6,000,000) and courthouse maintenance. She said the court has deferred maintenance, including a leaking roof, and faces staffing that the court described as roughly 85–90 full‑time employees, 15 judges and four commissioners.
The court presented caseload figures to illustrate demand: an average of about 5,500 criminal cases over the past three years across eight criminal divisions and roughly 17,500 civil filings annually. Miss Gibbons said commissioners’ court activity (handling callouts, bail-bond reviews) has helped reduce docket pressure for criminal judges.
Officials described a mix of funding the court uses beyond the parish general fund: two state appropriations used for improved courthouse security and technology, and grant-funded interventions such as pretrial services, recovery (drug) court, veterans treatment court and reentry court. Those programs have produced measurable graduates (more than 50 drug‑court graduates since March 2023 and an initial veterans‑court cohort), and the court framed them as cost‑saving alternatives to incarceration (the county jail custody cost cited was about $120 per person per day).
Council members and judges focused on a recurring funding problem: state-filed cases frequently are not required to pay filing fees, and fees or cost recovery often cannot be collected until appellate resolution, which can take years. Miss Gibbons estimated that unrecouped filing‑fee costs from government‑filed matters are on the order of $750,000 to $1,000,000 per year and that roughly 90–95% of that burden is state-related because many state agencies are headquartered in Baton Rouge and their suits are venued in the nineteenth JDC. Several judges said they have discussed pursuing statutory or legislative remedies and have had talks with the attorney general’s office about line items to address past costs.
The presentation closed by urging coordinated support across the criminal justice system — courts, the district attorney, public defenders and law enforcement — noting that difficulties in any one component impede the whole system. The council asked the court to continue working with the clerk of court to improve tracking of fees and collections and to report back with more granular breakdowns of which municipalities or agencies generate the unpaid filings.
Next steps: court staff said they will continue to press legislators and the attorney general for durable funding solutions and to provide the clerk of court data the council requested for more precise allocation estimates.
