Top judge says judicial vacancies are leading to greater delays, burnout
APRIL 2, 2025…..A big swath of the Massachusetts court system faces a potential hiring freeze if legislators do not boost funding levels beyond Gov. Maura Healey’s recommendations.
The Trial Court system is seeking $985.5 million in fiscal 2026 to keep up with labor and lease costs and IT modernization efforts, according to Administrator Thomas Ambrosino.
Ambrosino said the request — a more than $30 million increase over Healey’s recommended funding level of $952 million — would help the Trial Court stave off an “immediate hiring freeze.”
“I’ll lose 400 people with a hiring freeze in one year because that’s the number of people we go through in a yearly basis. We lose about 30-plus people a month — mostly through retirements, people leaving, the rare occasion when someone’s terminated,” Ambrosino said at a budget hearing Friday in Clinton.
There are nearly 400 Trial Court judges and more than 6,500 employees, Chief Justice Heidi Brieger said. The seven Trial Court departments are District Court, Boston Municipal Court, Housing Court, Juvenile Court, Land Court, Probate & Family Court, and Superior Court.
The Trial Court’s projected spending for the current budget year is $938.1 million. The court received a $932 million appropriation in the fiscal 2025 budget, up from $877.2 million in fiscal 2024 and $861.5 million in fiscal 2023.
While the hiring freeze would save millions of dollars by slashing personnel costs, Ambrosino warned public safety would “suffer” as the Trial Court sheds court officers and probation officers. Customer service will also deteriorate as the system loses clerical workers, he said.
Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Kimberly Budd told lawmakers that Healey’s budget “falls dangerously short of meeting the Judiciary’s needs.”
“The biggest concern is the recommendation for the Trial Court,” said Budd, who also acknowledged the “fiscal realities that are looming on the horizon.”
Beacon Hill budget-writers are grappling with modest revenue growth and escalating federal funding uncertainty. Healey’s budget incorporated more than $16 billion in federal dollars, with the majority linked to Medicaid funding congressional Republicans are eyeing for potential spending cuts.
Ambrosino called the Trial Court’s $985.5 million request a “maintenance budget” that would preserve the current fiscal year’s court operations and services. The ask is a $47 million increase over the Trial Court’s fiscal 2025 budget, which Ambrosino said involves $30 million in cost of living and collective bargaining raises, $7 million in higher lease costs for court buildings, and $10 million for “modernization” efforts.
The Legislature in 2022 approved a $165.5 million judiciary IT bond, though Ambrosino lamented its stalled rollout. He said the law’s six-year implementation plan requires an annual investment of $27 million to $28 million.
“We are not getting an allocation of anywhere near that amount from the state’s capital budget,” Ambrosino said. “We are getting, in the three years we’ve been into this, between $10 and $13 million a year. And I just learned yesterday from EOPSS that their recommendation for us for next year is $5 million, so that does not allow us to meet this need at all.”
To make up that capital investment deficit, Ambrosino said the Trial Court has dipped into its operating budget over the last three years to invest in WiFi and digital signage in courthouses.
Brieger, the chief justice, gave lawmakers a snapshot into the growing workload at the Trial Court, which has fielded 543,000 case filings since last July — a jump of 30,000 cases compared to this point last year.
The Trial Court has also seen a “tremendous increase in self-represented civil litigants,” including in Housing Court, District Court, and Probate and Family Court, Brieger said. Officials must deploy extensive resources to help those “confused” litigants navigate court procedures and paperwork, she said.
“We have a number of court service centers — many, many of them in your districts — that try to answer litigants’ basic questions, trying to give not legal advice, but procedural advice so that these folks can file their cases and get a hearing scheduled,” Brieger said. “In the courtroom, the judges take more time with self-represented litigants. It slows the docket down significantly, but it’s absolutely necessary to help people understand why it is they’re there.”
The Trial Court also has 17 judicial vacancies, including seven in Superior Court, Brieger said.
“This is not good, as you can imagine. It’s not good for the court system,” Brieger said. “Fewer judges lead to greater delays, and in many ways, this is throwing sand in my gears, and it causes judicial burnout. It erodes public trust and public faith in the outcome of our cases.”
House Democrats plan to release their redraft of Healey’s budget in mid-April. The governor’s bill called for a 7% spending increase and relied on some tax and revenue sources that House leaders have already dismissed.
