The South County Courthouse in Morgan Hill will no longer handle family law cases starting January 19, the latest in a series of cutbacks that Gilroy council members decried Monday for their impact on public finances and access to services.
The court is consolidating all of Santa Clara County’s family judicial services in the Family Justice Center Courthouse in downtown San Jose, it announced Nov. 12. The services provided at the Morgan Hill facility—where litigants can file for proceedings involving divorce, child support, restraining orders, and other family cases—will be transferred north.
The closure will place a significant burden on South County’s residents, said Gilroy City Councilman Perry Woodward, who attended a meeting called by presiding judge Risë Jones Pichon to discuss the change.
“It’s quite a problem for our residents,” Woodward said at this week’s city council meeting. “I tried to emphasize that and how difficult it is to get to San Jose when they don’t have cars.”
The closure will significantly complicate a vital public service, said Sheila Peterson, a family law attorney in Gilroy. Victims of domestic violence, for instance, will have to travel farther to file a restraining order, and the inconvenience may even dissuade them from trying at all, she said.
Attorneys’ practices will also suffer since process servers will have a harder time getting paperwork for filing, she added.
The Superior Court acknowledged the inconvenience to South County’s residents but emphasized the benefits of centralization.
“While it’s unfortunate that this consolidation will mean increased travel time for some of our South County residents, the incredible advantages that come from co-locating a wide array of Family Law related services is a clear benefit for all residents of this county,” Pichon said in a press release.
The decision follows last year’s closure of the Morgan Hill facility’s traffic, civil, and small claims services in October, a service reduction that already weighs on the city’s finances, Woodward said. Gilroy police officers must travel to the traffic court in Santa Clara every time a ticket is contested, a personnel constraint that costs the department time and money, he said.
Woodward requested that city staff conduct a study to determine how much money the city loses because of unenforced traffic tickets.
The closure partly nullifies the original purpose of the building, said Mayor Don Gage, who represented District One on the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors during the building’s planning and construction.
“The whole point of the courthouse in Morgan Hill was to bring services down here, not only for the courts and for the convenience of people living in this area, but for the simple fact that we need more services here,” Gage said. “We need district attorneys, we need public defenders, we need attorneys down here. “
Southern Santa Clara County was shouldering the burden of the state’s budgetary constraints, Gage said.
“We’re actually losing the service we were promised because of budget requirements,” he said. “And I understand all that, but that’s not taking into account the citizens.”
The Superior Court has a lower estimate of the closure’s financial impacts as well as its effect on public access.
Budget cuts were a factor in the decision to close the Morgan Hill courthouse’s family department but they were not the primary motivator, said Joe Macaluso, a spokesman for the Superior Court. It’s just a part of the Superior Court’s consolidation of its Family Division, he added.
The closure’s effect should be largely irrelevant to South County residents since most people in need of family law services would need to travel to the San Jose facility anyway, Macaluso said. Of all the judicial departments, the Family Division receives the largest percentage of filers who elect to represent themselves, and such filers depend on the self-help services only available in San Jose, he said. The Morgan Hill courthouse had a small self-help staff when it opened in 2009, but it was eliminated after low demand failed to justify the cost, he said.
