ALBANY – Financially and legislatively, the Judiciary is coming off a banner year. Although the single item the Third Branch most desired, an increase in assigned counsel rates, fell victim to the atrocities of Sept. 11, few at the Capitol can claim as successful a 2001 as the Judiciary.
Budgetarily, the annual brouhaha over the state budget was worse than ever, even before the terrorist attacks, and almost everyone became a casualty of the inability of the leadership to get the job done by the April 1 start of the fiscal year. But the Office of Court Administration had astutely front-loaded its spending plan, which meant that as the battle raged on the courts continued to function with hardly any glitch that could be attributed to the late budget. And when the Legislature finally did get around to passing a so-called “baseline” budget in August, the Judiciary emerged with its spending proposal 100 percent intact. Not one penny was cut from the $1.28 billion taxpayer-funded budget submitted by the Court of Appeals in December and ushered through the Legislature by Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman.
