A full-time, on-site Haines magistrate is the latest casualty in a long series of public service cuts brought on by Alaska’s budget crisis.
Following last month’s retirement of Haines Magistrate Judge John Hutchins, the Alaska Court System announced Sept. 1 that the position would be filled by Mary Kay Germain, the Yakutat Magistrate Judge. She will be present in Haines only one week a month.
“Ms. Germain will hold court in Haines and Hoonah one week a month and will conduct all other hearings telephonically from Yakutat,” said a press release from the Alaska Court System.
Trevor Stephens, presiding judge of the First Judicial District, which covers most of Southeast Alaska, said the move was part of a court system effort to manage budget cuts.
“Obviously it’s not an ideal situation,” said Stephens. “We would like to have people on the ground in each court location.”
Stephens said Hutchins’s retirement helped save money without cutting staff. “Our mantra is: ‘We don’t want to lay anybody off,'” he said.
This is the latest in a long series of public service cuts to Haines. In the past year, state funding shortages have cut into Haines’s public health positions, Lynn Canal Counseling Service, and the local forestry office, as well as the ferry service between Haines and Skagway.
Bonnie Hedrick, the Haines court clerk, said a downside of the new magistrate system will be the decline in the in-person access to the magistrate. “Communication is best face-to-face,” she said.
Without a full-time magistrate, local court hours will be reduced to 30.
Hedrick expects the new system will be similar to the procedure used when the previous magistrate was on vacation. It worked well in that situation, she said. “I don’t have enough info yet to know how it will work (long-term),” she said.
Magistrate judges are responsible for a variety of judicial tasks, including issuing arrest and search warrants, setting bail and conducting preliminary hearings, adjudicating misdemeanor and minor offense cases, and issuing marriage licenses.
Though she will juggle work in Haines, Yakutat and Hoonah, Haines’s incoming magistrate Germain said she’s confident she’ll be up to the job. “I’ve been covering Hoonah like that since the first of January,” Germain said. “It works in Hoonah and we anticipate it working in Haines.”
Germain expects the change will have little effect on Haines’ judicial proceedings.
“Hearings are going to occur in a timely fashion, as they do now,” she said, noting that prosecutors and public defenders, who are based in Juneau, usually attend Haines hearings by telephone.
Germain said that there are actually benefits to not being physically present at hearings.
“I think it helps us be impartial,” she said. “It’s possible to make judgments on somebody unknowingly just by looking at them.”
“You and I and everybody in the world has some way of making a predisposed judgment on a person just by looking at them,” she said.
Not all Haines residents share Germain’s optimism about the new system.
“As a community member, I’m very concerned because it’s always harder to start something up again or bring something back after it’s shut down,” said Debra Schnabel, executive director of the Haines Chamber of Commerce.
“We have a dysfunctional legislature that hasn’t figured out how to manage our fiscal resources,” Schnabel said.
Germain will become the official Haines magistrate on Oct. 1. Her first visit to Haines will be from Oct. 3-7.