Budget Cuts Prompt Santa Clara County Courts To Reduce Clerks' Office Hours

Santa Clara County Superior Court, citing budget cuts, plans to reduce business hours at its courthouses in San Jose, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and Morgan Hill by at least an hour per day, court officials said today.

As of Nov. 24, daily office and telephone hours for court clerk’s offices on regular weekdays will be from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., according to court spokesman Joe Macaluso.

That will mean that people who have to file cases or request copies of court documents will have to be in line by 3 p.m. at the latest to be served that day, Macaluso said.

Business hours for most of the county’s 11 courts are currently from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., except the Old Courthouse at 161 N. First St. in downtown San Jose that is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., according to the court’s website.

The court made the decision to trim its hours because of budget cuts to the state court system, which has suffered reductions since 2009 that have impacted individual superior courts, Macaluso said.

The county’s courts are operating with an $8 million deficit and to avoid layoffs, the court has about a 30 percent staff vacancy rate from not filling jobs after people leave, Macaluso said. The extra hour or two from the cutback will give the reduced staff more time to process court documents behind the scenes, he said.

“We definitely don’t want to do this, but an $8 million budget deficit is a tremendous burden,” Macaluso said.

“We’re simply trying not to have a backlog of work,” he said.

Employees of clerk’s offices will still work 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. shifts and the new hours will not apply to court case hearings or trials, he said.

On Aug. 5, the court announced that because of the same budget constraints, as of Oct. 6, civil, small claims and traffic courts in Morgan Hill and Palo Alto would be closed and the cases transferred.

Civil and small claims cases from Morgan Hill will be sent to the Downtown Courthouse at 191 N. First St. in San Jose and traffic cases to the Santa Clara Courthouse at 1095 Homestead Road in Santa Clara, according to court officials.

Small claims cases from Palo Alto will be heard in the Downtown Courthouse and traffic cases at the Santa Clara Courthouse, court officials said.

--Bay City News