Lexington Herald Leader: "So The [Kentucky Court House Building Orgy] Debt Grows And Where It Ends No One Knows."

Spending spree hits bottom line

When it comes to building courthouses, Kentucky is the state that just can't say no.

As a result of those easy ways, as the Herald-Leader's Linda Blackford recently reported, legislators and judicial officials are more preoccupied with balancing budgets than the scales of justice.

It's a sad story of collective self-indulgence. Kentucky's current fiscal crisis can be chalked up to many factors but one — amply demonstrated in the courthouse disaster — is garnering political favor by scattering building projects around the state with the idea that the bill will come due later.

Here's the back story: Former Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph E. Lambert embarked on a campaign to replace county courthouses in all of Kentucky's 120 counties. It's kind of a build-now-pay-later deal with the bonds for the new buildings only coming due when they are close to being complete and occupied. That can make it easy to approve projects (no impact in this fiscal year) and hard to pay for them.

This year, it's particularly hard to pay for them as the governor and legislature struggle to fill a gaping hole in the state budget.

So, with $880 million already poured into the courthouses, judicial officials are asking for another $76 million to meet the new debt payments and avoid massive layoffs throughout the state court system. The system, which laid off 47 people last fall, will struggle to keep the doors open every day without the infusion of new money.

It's an impossible choice: Squeeze overburdened courts even further, effectively removing access to justice for some Kentuckians; or take the money from threatened critical services like education, social services and public protection.

Or, stick the counties with the debt, a move that would likely push some of them into bankruptcy.

The answer isn't to stop all building projects or to build only those that can be paid out of current funds. Building projects that will serve the public for decades should reasonably be paid for over the longer term.

The trouble is that it's just too easy to scatter pork in the form of questionable building projects around the state and pass the bill on to future taxpayers.

Chief Justice Joseph Minton, who inherited this mess from his successor, has tried to put the brakes to the runaway building. In the last budget cycle, the Administrative Office of the Courts, which Minton directs, recommended only one new courthouse — for Carlisle County where the previous one had burned.

Legislators, though, added four more in Allen, Bracken, Lawrence and Morgan counties. The economic and judicial logic may have been blurry but the political logic was crystal clear: "If people from around the state are going to get one, my folks deserve one, too," said Rep. Mike Denham, D-Maysville, who represents Bracken County.

So the debt grows and where it ends no one knows.