July 15, 2018 Letters
Letters
Marchman and Baker Acts
After nearly 37 years of being a Florida Bar member, I write you for the first time. The idea that Florida lawyers and judges are leading an effort to involuntarily commit people with mental health or substance abuse problems for up to 10 days without a hearing is sickening. And all in the name of court efficiency.
Please understand that “commit” means to lock up. No such “commitment” would be allowed in the criminal justice system. How can lawyers and judges advocate for such a result in a civil justice system? Judges may seek more court efficiency, but the idea that court efficiency could ever trump due process and the right to be promptly heard threatens the core principles of our legal system.
I hope The Florida Bar recognizes this effort as unconscionable and fundamentally unfair. Leading this effort demeans our profession. Instead, the Bar must oppose this effort strongly.
Terrence E. Kehoe
Orlando
Moral Absolutes
When someone writes that a court decision is “godless,” my first reaction is always to wonder whose God we are talking about.
Why is it that most of us are unwilling to consider that our “unchanging truths” might not be universally accepted, and, more importantly, shouldn’t be imposed on others just because you think that is what your God wants.
I thank God every day for a society and court system that guarantees my freedom from your religious beliefs. American soldiers are fighting and dying in foreign lands to protect innocents from the likes of ISIS, whose unchanging truths include the right to exact corporal punishment and death upon those who oppose their interpretation of one of the thousands of holy books that mankind has conjured.
If all those books were divinely inspired why are there so many different ones? If my divinely inspired holy book allows or prohibits something different from yours, is my work to persuade a court to adopt my view of the world necessarily (if successful) the result of “godless logic?”
If you want to work in a world of moral absolutes, it seems the clergy is a more appropriate vocation than lawyering.
Garry D. Adel
Ocala
Who’s a Good Boy?
In response to Mr. Miller’s scathing indictment of dogs in the office and in the now infamous words of the popular Twitter account “Thoughts of Dog,” They’re good dogs, Greg.
Allison J. McCabe
Port Orange
The Foundation
I have been a member of The Florida Bar since 1978 and dedicated my legal career, and really, my life, to those of us, who for reasons of economic status, race, and gender, did not have ready access to protections of the law.
When I retired from Legal Services of North Florida in 2016 after 38 years, I feared for the future services that would be made available to low-income Floridians in large part because of the massive changes that have been implemented by The Florida Bar Foundation.
Over the course of my tenure, the statewide community developed a dedicated cadre of experienced advocates and a system of coordinated efforts to ensure high-quality representation was available throughout the state. It was not perfect but it produced amazing results. The Foundation played an integral role in building the system and coordinating the efforts. When the long-time executive director and director of grant programs at the The Foundation retired a few years back, new leadership decided massive changes were in order rather than a few tweaks. Reasoning went that because programs were only meeting 20 percent of the need, changes had to be made. Ignore the fact that resources were not available to meet any additional need. And ignore the fact that none of the strategies employed solved that problem, in fact just the opposite. (Current projections indicate 10 percent of the need is being met.)
The Foundation removed transparency and rejected input from executive directors of delivery programs. Once accomplished, they (1) increased funding for pro bono efforts with a resultant reduction in attorneys participating, (2) increased funding for technology that has produced no meaningful results and will never solve the most complicated problems for large portions of the low-income community, (3) increased the population eligible for The Foundation funded services with reduced available revenues, (4) reduced funding for direct services resulting in less available staff with expertise in numerous areas of the law, (5) eliminated funding for coordinating training efforts for less experienced delivery staff replacing it with costly statewide meetings and trainings which programs were mandated to attend without meaningful outcomes or input, (6) more recently, eliminated funding for general support services substituting it instead for programs like student loan repayment assistance and fellowships, (7) hired many consultants in addition to more Foundation staff, reducing further the limited funds available to represent domestic violence victims, seniors, veterans, children, and other low-income vulnerable populations, and (8) changed their programs to increase the number of people eligible for services while available funding was drastically reduced due to interest rate reductions and decreases in property transactions.
In addition to reductions and redistribution of funding that have negatively impacted legal aid programs’ ability to meet the needs of low-income people, the Foundation has implemented new programs to drive more clients to delivery programs. This new direction has also decreased program stability in other ways. Programs have a wide variety of funding sources, many of them federal. Those grants can be held up by congressional appropriations and are often not announced until significantly after the current grant ends. Many require matching funds but federal cannot be used to match federal. Historically, Foundation funds provided gap funding, matching funds to enable programs to draw down federal funds, and coverage for unallowable expenses under federal guidelines. They are no longer available for
those purposes. The Foundation continues to fund special purpose grants but all applications are competitive, further creating instability in presumptive funding and removing any semblance of providing pro rata funding to all areas of the state. A good example is the $23 million received from the Bank of America settlement in 2015, then held by the Foundation with the first $1.5 million dollars of which was allocated to seven programs in 2017 for a very limited scope of services.
The Foundation Board of Directors has an opportunity to return the Foundation to its previous stellar reputation as a leader in coordinating collaborative efforts and enhancing the future and efficiency of the civil legal aid network that has been sorely lacking. Priorities need to be redirected to allow collaborative efforts with grantees, return transparency to the process, embrace input from delivery program executive directors, fund services particularly through staff driven models, return pro bono recruitment and coordination to the local programs, recognize the limitations of technology for low-income people, restore funds for training that is identified by delivery programs, and reduce reliance on consultants.
Kristine E. Knab
Tallahassee
