Should Auburn restart its own municipal court?

In 2012, Auburn’s leaders fretted that the city’s then-municipal court judge, Patrick Burns, was holding people in jail for too long, denying defendants their constitutionally-mandated right to a speedy trial, and costing the city and its police department too much money.

So, with cost savings in mind, on Nov. 1, 2012, the Auburn City Council chose to shelve its municipal court agreement and instead contract with King County District Court to process and adjudicate cases for the city, as the county does today for 11 other cities.

So, 12 years in, how’s it working out?

Getting an answer is complicated — with many moving parts — as the first timeline of the current 2022-2026 agreement approaches. The agreement directs that if Auburn decides to terminate the contract, it must provide King County written notice by Feb. 1, 2025, with the official termination on Dec. 31, 2026.

That’s the question King County District Court Presiding Judge Rebecca Robertson and Candis Martinson, the city’s director of Health and Human Services, who manages the court, tried to answer for the Auburn City Council on Monday evening, Dec. 9.

“Candis Martinson provided us with some wonderful information that the relationship with King County District Court had greatly improved, and that its services were working very well,” said Abby Kuschel, principal consultant with the consulting firm National Center for State Courts, with which the city entered into a contract in 2022.

Kushcel and her NCSC colleague, John Doerner, principal court consultant for NCSC, worked together to compile the two reports on the court. The first they presented to the council in 2023, the second last Monday evening.

Over three days in February 2023, the firm conducted 25 interviews with the courts’ stakeholders to get an overview of what they considered to be the strengths and challenges of a municipal court system. They found a “disconnect” or “misalignment” between how KCDC and the majority of the stakeholders viewed their relationship.

Findings in the reports

The first report examined court data, including state statistics and case filings, costs, revenues and incarceration costs, provided by Auburn and King County that enabled it to complete a financial summary of what an alternative would look like.

Further, it studied other cities that offer municipal court services — including Puyallup, Federal Way, Renton, and Kent —and completed a cost-benefit analysis to learn about the potential costs the city would incur for operational changes, should it choose to stand up its own court. It also provided a cost-benefit analysis.

The earlier study examined expenses and revenue for the SCORE jail in Des Moines, and recommended at the time service hours for the court should the city opt for an independent municipal court, and looked at startup costs and any changes of service that would occur with the change.

The report likewise discussed areas where the “misalignment of perspectives” had manifested, as follows:

That the interlocal agreement’s cost model was allowing Covington’s court to have cases heard in Auburn without paying the city any rent for the space. Recently, the city asked Covington to vacate the premises and for it to arrange to have its cases heard elsewhere.

Calendar issues identified by Auburn’s chief prosecutor in 2023, among them that the court was running up against speedy trial issues with the city’s public defender and prosecutor. The chief prosecutor wanted both sides to work together and to devise workable solutions to present to KCDC, showing a unified approach to tackling the calendar concerns.

Judge Robertson acknowledged there there are speedy trial issues in Auburn, but attributed them in part to the backlog at the time since cleared. This stemmed from the city’s high number of cases and the lack of adequate room to hear them. Robertson at the time also discussed the role that court rules, and attorneys’ frequent requests for continuances, played in creating those backlogs.

The second report, or Phase 2, offers a new financial analysis to determine if anything has changed since 2023. To put it together, they studied four local municipal courts — Kent, Renton, Federal Way and Puyallup — for comparison, having acquired from them case filings, operational and budget information along with staffing, caseload levels and additional data from the Washington State Courts’ statistical website.

Here are some of the findings, according to the latest report:

Case filings in Auburn and in each of the comparative courts dropped significantly during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, in line with statistics for courts nationwide. Auburn and Renton were already dealing with declining case filings from 2018 to 2019.

In four of the five courts, including Auburn, infraction and misdemeanor filings stayed generally flat, while Federal Way’s court continued to decline through 2020, but rebounded in 2024, based on analyzed, year-to-date data.

In 2024, incoming case filings were increasing, although inaction and misdemeanor filings in all five courts remain substantially below the pre-pandemic years. Auburn’s case filings are consistently higher than Renton’s, although the trend lines between the two are similar.

According to the report, costs paid to King County District Court through the interlocal agreement were as follows:

• 2018: $2,000,666

• 2019: $1,684,129

• 2020:$1,473,781

• 2021: $1,289,534

• 2022: $1,396,682

• 2023: $2,065,735

The numbers for 2024 were not available as of Monday evening, and they will be crucial to what the city decides to do.

As a percentage of total expenses, salaries and benefits in all five courts typically compose between 79% and 89% of total court-operating expenditures. Among the four comparison courts, salary and benefit expenditures for the years in which they were available are as follows:

Kent’s court had the highest total operating expenditures in each year except 2022.

Renton had the second highest annual operating expenditures.

What’s next?

Most cities in Washington state are statutorily responsible to provide for the prosecution, indigent defense, adjudication, sentencing and incarceration of misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor offenses adults commit within city limits, including traffic and non-traffic misdemeanors.

So, crucially, if the city chooses not to continue with KCDC, how much would it cost to return to municipal court system, given that the city has more people in jail at any given time by population than do the cities of Kent or Federal Way?

If the city went the municipal court route, it would lose its ability to hold protection and anti-harassment order hearings here. Also, a municipal court, unlike district court, requires elections to choose the judges. Only the City of Seattle is required to choose a judge who lives within city limits, but elsewhere in King County, the candidate only has to live in the county.

“Election for the those judges actually happens in South King County,” Robertson said in 2023, “so voters in other areas, including parts of Renton and Covington and other areas, would also vote for the Auburn judges.”

King County judges, typically two per district court, are chosen from a pool of four to five, and that would no longer be an option with a municipal court.

Robertson has acknowledged there there are speedy trial issues in Auburn, but attributed them in part to the backlog stemming from Auburn’s high number of cases and the lack of adequate room to hear them.

In the end, Robertson said, it’s up to individual judges to grant or deny those requests. She added that KCDC has caught up on Auburn’s COVID-induced backlog.

The city has since expanded its community court by facilitating greater police involvement with the adults who commit the offenses.