Judge tells Fayette to close three district justice offices
Fayette County soon will be without three of its 13 district justices. In a letter sent to President Judge Conrad B. Capuzzi, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court asks the county’s top judge to eliminate “a minimum of three district justice offices,” Court Administrator Karen Kuhn said.
Capuzzi has until March 3 to make the decision as to which offices will be closed, according to Kuhn.
“This is going to be hard to do,” she said.
The letter, which arrived Thursday, essentially denied a proposal drawn up last year by then-President Judge William J. Franks. He asked the Supreme Court to retain all of the county’s district justice offices, despite low caseloads in some of them.
The number of district justices in each Pennsylvania county is re-evaluated every 10 years, when new census results are tallied.
The county lost no district justices as a result of the 1990 census, even though the area dropped in population by 13,593 people between 1980 and 1990. The county had a modest gain of 3,293 people between 1990 and 2000.
Kuhn and deputy court administrator Roberta Meese spent the better part of the day Friday poring over maps, statistics and a plethora of other considerations to gather information for Capuzzi.
“There are a lot of factors that go into this decision,” said Kuhn, who noted that the decision as to which offices go ultimately is up to Capuzzi.
She said that with so many things to consider, it is impossible to
say just how the decision will be made.
“There isn’t just one thing to look at. There are so many factors to consider with something like this,” said Kuhn, who helped Franks prepare his district justice proposal for the high court last year.
At a public hearing in April on that proposal, Franks indicated that he was concerned what would happen to mountain-area District Justice Wendy Dennis, since her office had the smallest caseload. He addressed that issue by including information for the Supreme Court that said Dennis’ office accounts for about one-fifth of the entire county and serves many of the smaller mountain communities. Some of those communities border West Virginia and Maryland.
Franks also had asked the court to consider incoming businesses and the rural make-up of Fayette County in making its decision.
Dennis and District Justice Randy Abraham were the only two magistrates to attend that April hearing.
Abraham and District Justices Ronald Haggerty and Dwight Shaner all are up for re-election this year.
Art Heinz, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, was unavailable Friday to determine if election laws would stop any of the men from losing their offices because of the upcoming election.