Councilmember Viegeran.

Here.

Councilmember Anderete Gavito.

Councilmember White?

Here.

Chair McKee Rodriguez.

Present.

Chair, we have a court.

Wonderful.

The first item we have for consideration is the minutes from the municipal court meeting on December 1st, 2025.

I understand a motion for approval.

I make a motion to approve.

Wonderful.

We have a motion and a second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Motion passes.

We have two items today.

One is going to be a municipal court briefing on the court and judicial performance and current and upcoming court engagements, some of the events that they do throughout the throughout the year.

Then we have a second item, which is going to be overview of the municipal court and judge appointment process, which we currently have the job posted and will be preparing fairly soon for our interviews.

Overly lenient.

And so what I what I asked and what I wanted is any data that either affirms that claim or refutes it.

And so we have a lot of data here today, and we're gonna have a great dialogue and back and forth.

But I know several of you have expressed some of that concern, and so I wanted to make sure we had that conversation here.

So take it away.

Thank you, Chair.

Uh Fred Garcia with the municipal court.

First off, uh I'd like to say that uh had some confusions with the actual PowerPoint.

So this is an updated from the uh previous one that we submitted for the first uh uh meeting.

Okay, so the data uh shows that judicial activity uh for the time period of uh May 1st, 2024 through December 31st, 2025.

We thought it'd be appropriate uh to give you the data during the current judicial term uh when uh the the full-time judges are are performing uh their judicial duties.

Uh we cut it off at December 31st just to help with uh data collection.

Um it's at a macro level, uh holistic high level look at the the uh the data.

Uh not everything is captured on on the on the presentation.

For example, I know we just had a a uh presentation on juvenile uh court uh matters.

So some of the things like juvenile court um a number of uh trial settings, free trial hearing sets, those data is not there, and I understand that the uh committee wants to at future council uh committee meetings to actually address individual uh courtroom performance, and I I suspect that those will happen then uh because each courtroom uh it'll take a whole presentation just to kind of like dig through all the actual work they do uh in each court.

So it's this is high level.

Um this first slide uh we thought it'd be a good idea to capture uh overall work volume that we deal with during that term.

Uh you notice uh we break things up to criminal cases and civil cases, that's our jurisdiction.

Uh the the line share of cases are traffic violations, 199,249 during that time period and a non-traffic uh violations.

We highlighted some of the uh non-traffic types on the right.

Uh those seems to be the types of um cases that uh the committee is interested in.

So we we pulled those three out to kind of look at um and on the civil side you'll see um civil code violations 14,397 and civil parking violations 11,503.

So a total of 369,694.

Um you'll notice on the right hand side too that the animal cases are high, and as you recall, uh with the work that uh ACS uh animal care services has been doing this last fiscal year, um, an amount of cases that they actually filed that has jumped tremendously from prior years and prior years.

It was mainly heavy on the civil violations as opposed to criminal violations, and so that switched uh last fiscal year, where they're focusing on issuing um criminal violations.

Um this next slide here is uh criminal case outcomes of resolution.

Again, we kind of at a high level look at what's actually happening during that term.

Uh you'll see uh these are judicial orders and decision making outcomes by the by the judges during that time period.

Uh largest number is 91,979.

That's convictions uh with a payment of some sort.

Um that's that's really it could have been a payment plan, it could have been what we call straight pay where they're just uh assess a dollar amount and they pay it, or it could be some other matter uh that ends up in a a payment uh maybe after uh uh a conviction for approbation or or failure to do a defensive driving requirement.

That's the highest number.

Um next, you'll see the convictions also for non-cash that is high 52,654.

Keep in mind that those convictions are uh either a case that got time served, the individual got a credit for time served, uh the individual may have gotten a community service order uh that equates to these dollars amounts or cases being processed as as community service non-cash.

Um also um waiver.

So if the judge finds an undue hardship on the individual that they're unable to perform either uh extended overpayment plan to to assess uh the violation to hold them responsible, uh the judge can order community service, but there's times where the statute allows uh judges a lot of options uh to either give community service, uh maybe they'll send them to a mentoring class, uh, if they continue their education, that could be considered community service.

There's a number of things that the judge does.

If those things aren't available or can't work, then the judge can decide undue hardship and waive the fine and court cause, and that happens.