by Daniel Cox


Governor Bush, Florida Lawmakers Deliver
Landmark bill approves $2 million for the state’s legal aid community

Twelve months ago it seemed inconceivable that the Florida legislature would allocate $2 million for civil justice efforts. Florida’s economy has been in a tailspin for the past year, and in a special legislative session last fall, legislators cut the state budget by $1 billion.

What’s more, the legislature had never before allocated a dime to legal services for the poor. Yet last summer—with Governor Jeb Bush’s blessing, and his signature—landmark civil justice funding legislation became law in Florida. The legislature appropriated $2 million for 15 legal aid pilot projects, ranging from legal education initiatives for self-represented clients to free assistance for parents seeking child support. 

“For many years we had dreamed about getting Florida on board with so many other states, in terms of having a state component for funding legal services for the poor,” says Terry Russell, immediate past president of the Florida Bar Association. “Florida was one of only 11 states that had no state funding for legal aid.”

During Russell’s one-year term, he made state support for legal services one of the Bar’s top priorities. It was clear to Russell that there were inadequate resources to help clients with the most fundamental problems, such as securing protective orders and child custody for battered women trying to escape their abusers.

Last year, Florida’s lawyers donated 1.3 million hours of pro bono work and $2.5 million in contributions. But the unmet legal needs were still staggering, partly due to stagnant federal funding and shortfalls in the usual revenues of Florida’s IOTA program. “We had a $15-million dollar program,” Russell says, “but we were still turning two out of three people away who needed legal services and were otherwise qualified for them.”

Despite the overwhelming demand for services, most legislators were largely unaware of the need, Russell says. So with the help of Steve Metz, a lobbyist retained by the Florida Bar, Russell initiated a vigorous education campaign with state policymakers. “We visited every key legislator; we hounded the ones we had to hound,” Russell says. “[We] literally marched this thing through every committee process and through the office of every legislator that had questions.”

It was a good investment of shoe leather. The legislators were receptive—downright sympathetic, in many cases. State Rep. Dudley Goodlette (R-Naples) and State Sen. Burt Saunders (R-Naples) sponsored versions of the legislation, which ended up becoming the Florida Access to Civil Legal Assistance Act. The bill passed unanimously in the Senate and with only one dissenting vote in the House (for a final vote tally of 159-1). 

Despite the state’s funding history, Russell was not surprised to see such strong bipartisan support. “It [passed] for a simple reason: The bill had a very powerful message and a very pure purpose.”
During a time when budget cutbacks have become the norm in almost every state, near-unanimous support of the Civil Legal Assistance Act has re-energized Florida’s equal justice community. “It marks a watershed change and a step forward in Florida’s public policy,” says Bill Davis, chairman of the Florida Bar Foundation’s Legal Assistance for the Poor Grant Committee. Their ambitious goal for next year: $10 million.

Kentucky Crisis Averted By Legislature

Already reeling from dramatic federal funding cuts, legal services attorneys in Kentucky thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Then they did.

Advocates were coping with a $1.4-million federal shortfall this fall when state legislators—confronting their own budget crisis—announced that Kentucky equal justice programs would lose another $334,000 in state funding over the next 14 months. All told, legal aid was looking at more than $1.9 million in cuts this year, according to Jamie Hamon, executive director of the state’s Access to Justice Foundation.

“They were in the process of shutting down legal aid offices here in Kentucky,” State Rep. Charles Geveden (D-Wickliffe) explained after introducing a bill to increase court filing fees to raise $1.3 million to offset some of legal services’ losses. “Hopefully this will keep some of those offices open.”

Geveden likely got his wish March 11 in a late-night legislative session, where the Kentucky Senate unanimously approved his bill to double district and circuit court filing fees. The legislation now moves to the desk of Governor Paul Patton for his signature. Hamon said that while the bill will not completely close the funding chasm, it will give understaffed programs some much-needed “breathing room” to continue offering core services.

Persistence has been the watchword in Kentucky’s equal justice community in recent months as cuts mounted and advocates worked together to find alternative funding sources. Last fall, legal aid leaders launched a massive media blitz that resulted in a series of editorials and news articles highlighting the funding plight. Hamon also spearheaded a grassroots lobbying campaign. “Our goal was to make sure that all legislators received at least 10 calls from people in their district on this issue,” she says. 

Lawmakers got the message.

“I didn’t just jump up and do it,” Geveden says of offering the bill. “I didn’t know there was a need; the folks at legal services brought this to my attention.” Word of the crisis also reached his colleagues—in both chambers, on both sides of the aisle. The vote for the filing-fee increase was 90-5 in the House and 36-0 in the Senate.

“It was the most amazing press campaign I’ve ever seen,” says Don Saunders, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association’s Director of Civil Legal Services. “It’s not something you could have even imagined in Kentucky five years ago. It took recruiting people of all parties and all beliefs to say: ‘It’s justice that matters here.’”

Oregon Governor’s Powerful Pledges

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski’s words were unforgettable, but his actions at the state’s 12th Campaign for Equal Justice Annual Luncheon on March 9 spoke even louder. Kulongoski’s speech began with a pledge to help bring the “light of social justice to families whose stories are invisible” and concluded with another pledge—to double his annual personal contribution to the state’s Campaign for Equal Justice to $2,000.

The Governor explained to more than 400 advocates and dignitaries in attendance that his wife, Oregon First Lady Mary Oberst, has been one of the Campaign’s strongest supporters, in part, because her father—a constitutional law professor at the University of Kentucky—is “an outspoken and courageous advocate for the poor.” Calling on the state’s lawyers to give more, the Governor said he and his wife were “ready to make every active lawyer in Oregon a believer.”

EXCERPTS FROM GOV. KULONGOSKI’S SPEECH

The Campaign is more than a cause—it is a moral obligation. As officers of the court, we are duty-bound to keep the courthouse doors open to everyone. This is especially true now, as Oregon’s faltering economy washes more and more families onto the shore of poverty and hardship. 

Oregon lawyers cannot turn our economy around. That’s not your responsibility. But it is your responsibility, and mine, to help the Campaign for Equal Justice turn around the lives of people who need legal services but cannot afford them. Mary and I believe this to the marrow…. Lawyers who work for legal aid are the keepers of Oregon’s tradition of tolerance and fair dealing—a tradition that is as much a part of our quality of life as the coast, mountains, and high desert. We’re all better off when the light of social justice is brought to families whose stories are invisible—and whose ability to fight back, without help, is a pipe dream. 

To [legal aid lawyers], I want to acknowledge that you’re not fighting for the poor because the money is just too good to turn down. And you’re certainly not fighting for the poor because it is easy. Your clients frequently have multiple problems. Many pay over 60 percent of their limited fixed incomes on rent. Their lives are, to say the least, difficult, and helping navigate the maze of legal issues they confront is difficult, too. So something else is going on. Something else puts legal aid lawyers on the path least taken: representing families whose faces are pressed against the windowpane of the American Dream. I believe that even in this cynical and acquisitive age, legal aid lawyers are driven by a unique spirit of public service. You have chosen to be the guardians of justice and equality. 

The fight over the Legal Services Corporation was never about the role of government. It was about powerful interests with deep pockets looking for a way to remove inconvenient plaintiffs—and roll over poor and unsophisticated defendants. In 1995, LSC funding was cut by one-third…. The irony of this attack on LSC is that it did not even pass the test of good political sense—let alone the test of decency.

We know that justice is one of a handful of core values that is supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans. Ninety percent or more. Our citizens fundamentally believe that our Constitution demands equal treatment before the law, that justice must be blind to the status of the parties, that the courts must be a refuge from the arbitrary acts of government and the abusive acts of private entities. And that if money is needed to pay for a justice system that is fair, impartial, and protective of the weak as well as the strong—that money must be found.