“A billion here, a billion there—sooner or later it adds up to real money.”  Senator Everett Dirksen (1896-1969)

On Dec. 1, 2017, Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks published his 188 page “New York State Unified Court System Budget, Fiscal Year 2018-2019.”  The opening page states, “The 2018-2019 State Operating Funds Budget request totals $2.23 Billion.”  Chief Judge DiFiore certified that “the attached schedules are the itemized estimates of the Financial Needs of the Judiciary for the fiscal year beginning April 1, 2018.”   Except that is not the cost of New York’s Judiciary.   This March Judge Marks published the Unified Court System Annual Report as required by the New York Constitution.   He wrote, “Appropriations of $2.96 billion were approved for the State Judiciary for the 2017-2018 fiscal year.”  So what about that extra $730 million?  The trick is in the term State Operating Funds which obviously doesn’t include all the sources of court funding.   This happens every year, and the budget submitted in December never mentions the actual money spent by the Judiciary.