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Show Heavy caseload depleats i juvenile court's '90 budget Bv SCOTT SUMMKRILL FARMINGTON The budget for Davis County's Juvenile Court is down to $79 with more than four months of expenses to go. Davis County accountant Steve Rawlins presented a bill to the county commission last week from the Sheriff's Department for $201.05 for the transportation of a juvenile to Brigham City. The Juvenile Court budget began the year with $25,000 for just such an occurrence. But, with attorney costs up more than any other year in the county, the funds have been diminished in just over seven months. "The juvenile budget account has been very hard to anticipate," Rawlins said. "There's been an overage in attorney costs for juvenile juv-enile cases." "This really rubs me raw," said Commissioner William Lawrence. "We gave a contract to Steve Vanderlinden to handle juvenile cases. Now there's not enough money. ' Assistant County Attorney Jerry Hess said the county has little con- trol over how many cases the courts will give to public defenders, and if the salary for the work is not enough, there could be further costs from allegations of inadequate legal representation. "We get in a real bind if we don't pay attorneys enough," he said. "Defendants could start claiming they are not getting good representation, and we end up back in court." Hess said the current salary for the county's juvenile attorney averages $30 per hour. Rawlins pointed out the budget will not require another infusion of funds if there are no further conflicts con-flicts such as the transportation billing. bill-ing. But, he pointed out that, although al-though the Sheriff's Department has a transportation budget for prisoners, it does not include the transport of juveniles. "Even if we put in enough i money to take care of this problem," prob-lem," Lawrence said, "the same thing could happen again. We're sort of locked up into increasing ' this budget" ' , , j Commissioner Gayle Stevenson explained this is the first. year the juvenile court has had an attorney and a separate budget to handle such cases. As such, the budget was hard to judge and was set at almost one-third of the budget allocated by neighboring Weber County for the same services. "We knew we didn't have a good handle on the actual cost," he said. "I would recommend we pay this out of the contingency fund, rather than increasing the juvenile court budget. ' The motion to pay $201.05 to the Sheriff's Department from the county's contingency fund was carried car-ried with a unanimous vote of approval ap-proval and the recommendation that the juvenile court budget be made a line item on the 1991 budget. |