CHC 1979-05-22 PH - Laserfiche WebLink

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REV. BOSHARD: That is the reason why I went along with the recommendation of streamlining because most of these people will be working under one department and you need not have various departments here. ' You have one department and you have all these various staff members who can do planning,'erigineering, plans , water, etc. , etc. , all under one department. Thank you very much. CHAIRMAN SAKATA: Thank you, Rev. Boshard. Next we would like to call on Steven Kornberg. MR. KORNBERG: My name is Steve Kornberg. I am a resident of Captain Cook. I would like to propose that the charter be amended to prohibit any further expenditure for the investigation and prosecution of marijuana cases. I feel that the cost to our county is way beyond what most people have any concept about and that the social benefit that comes to our county as a result of this expenditure is almost nil . There are two large costs that I would like to address to the commission. The first one has to do with just the expenditure of money. Last year, in the fiscal year of ' 77 and ' 78 almost 35% of all the cases filed in circuit court in this county were for the prosecution of drug related offences. Most of those are marijuana cases. The police budget that is .recommended to be adopted is close to $6 million dollars. If we look at the arrests in case files as what we get from our police department, almost $2 million one could argue as being allocated to investigate and prosecute marijuana cases. I think that is ridiculous. Further, I think that there is another cost to our county that is even more significant in the expenditure of money. We rely on our court system, "I think , to deter ;criminals _ and protect us in the criminal area and provide a forum for -concept resolution in the civil area. ' The court system succeeds in these endeavors primarily when there is adequate access. The deterrent to criminals and the protection we receive from our criminal justice system is enhanced when there are rapid prosecutions of priority type crimes. The calendar in the circuit court--the civil calendar--is getting tremendously= jammed. I understand that in the last year the arrests have doubled. It has been estimated to me that '30% of this increase are marijuana cases. As a result, one cannot get a tri'all set in a civil case in Judge Kubota' s courtroom even if they,.were,iset tomorrow until next March. That means that the functions that `lawyersain--our system play'.' in trying to resolve disputes has -an inherrent lag in it because having the availability of the court system is a major part of resolving the disputes and moving on. I feel that the court system is overcrowded. We are starting to face problems that didn ' t exist a few years ago. There has been lots of discussion about priorities . . .Paring down the expenditure of the county in terms of getting the most kick out of our tax dollar and as a taxpayer, my7thi.nking is it is absolutely ridiculous that that kind of money and those costs are incurred with very little social benefit. Any particular -19-