Court fee hike amended to avoid Gibbons’ veto

By Cy Ryan (contact)

Friday, May 29, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Carson City — A bill to fund nine new district court judgeships by raising the cost of filing civil lawsuits has been amended in an attempt to avoid a veto by Gov. Jim Gibbons.

Assembly Bill 65 had required that $20 of each civil lawsuit filing fee be sent to a legal services organization. Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, which employs Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, as its director, would have received the money generated in Clark County.

After learning the governor would likely veto the bill if it included the provision, state Sen. Randolph Townsend, R-Reno, proposed, and the Senate accepted on a voice vote, an amendment deleting the $20 fee.

Buckley, a political rival and potential challenger to Gibbons in his 2010 bid for reelection, abstained from voting when the bill was approved in the Assembly.

Townsend said after the vote that he had it on “good authority” that Gibbons would veto the bill if funding for legal services were included.

“If I didn’t take it out it was going to be vetoed and we can’t have Assembly Bill 64 that provides for the judges and not have the funding for it,” Townsend said, referring to companion legislation creating the nine judgeships. “Then Clark County would have been required to fund them out of their own budget. My guess is they would have come up short.”

The companion bill, AB64, calls for nine new district judges, two of them in family court, in Clark County. It also provides one more judge for Washoe County. AB64 is in the Senate Judiciary Committee and is expected to be approved.

In his floor remarks, Townsend said the fee for legal services had nothing to do with financing new judgeships. He said all of the money raised by the bill should be directed to hiring the badly needed judges.

The higher filing fees would take effect July 1 and impose an additional $99 charge on the filing of civil lawsuits, except for those dealing with business and construction defects. Construction defect lawsuits would cost $349 to file and lawsuits related to “a business matter pursuant to the local rules of practice” would cost $1,359 to file.

The money would pay for staff, judicial salaries, furniture and other costs related to the new judicial departments. In the past, the state paid only the salaries of judges.

The bill appears to have a clear path through the Legislature, but it remains to be seen whether Gibbons will support the fee increases even with the legal services fees taken out.

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Two years have passed since Dina Titus endured a Carson City legislative session, but the freshman congresswoman said Thursday that she is still engaged in addressing Nevada’s budget challenges while serving in Washington.

“I thought I could put some distance between me and the Legislature, but it doesn’t work that way — it’s all connected,” Titus told the Sun. “Everyone who comes to see me in Washington from the state is asking me for something that’s been cut at this level — transportation dollars, education dollars, health and human services dollars, you name it.”

Sun reporter Emily Richmond contributed to this story.