Small Biz Suffers From State Budget Cuts for Courts

Real estate developer Darius Ross thought he had an open-and-shut case after he’d paid a plumber in Binghamton, N.Y., $25,000 for what he considered substandard work on an apartment complex. Instead, Ross says, it took 18 months and more than $10,000 in legal fees before a judge denied his request for a trial. “The court was very short-staffed,” says Ross, who believes an appeal would have consumed at least another year. With legal fees mounting and the renovated apartments sitting empty, “We just had to walk away from it.”

New York is one of 42 states that have reduced public funding for courts in the past three years, according to the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). State governments cut fiscal 2012 court budgets by a cumulative $600 million, or 5 percent, and 34 states left judicial vacancies unfilled and furloughed or laid off court workers.