The Hammond Common Council has agreed to extend the life of the City Court for one year.
The City Court, which was slated to close at the end of 2018, still has a backlog of roughly 30,000 cases, according to the city, and officials didn’t want to push that added caseload onto the county courts.
“I think this is really reasonable,” Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said.
McDermott said many of the remaining cases go back to the 1970s and 1980s, and would be a burden for the county courts to absorb that workload.
City attorney Kris Kantar said she remembers seeing an illegal dumping case from 1987. Kantar said those old cases can likely be dismissed.
McDermott said if the court closed in 2018, the county would have to resolve cases that have lingered for decades.
Hammond began transferring cases from the City Court to the county in early 2017.
Starting Jan. 1, Hammond criminal cases started being filed in the county courts, with infraction cases following suit on July 1, according to the ordinance. The ordinance also said ordinance violations would be filed in line with the unsafe building law, according to the text, and the city clerk would accept small claims, plenary cases, collection cases and eviction filings.
Council President Janet Venecz asked if City Judge Amy Jorgensen would be able to clear the backlog by the end of next year.
“I think we should communicate that,” McDermott said.
Aside from enabling the court to clear the old cases, McDermott said the extension will also give the city more time to absorb employees from the court into other departments.
“It gives us one more year to relocate employees,” McDermott said.
McDermott has said the city had long considered closing the court as a cost-savings measure.
In December 2016, McDermott announced after Jorgensen’s appointment by then-Gov. Mike Pence, he’d ask the Common Council to consider an ordinance closing the city court. The council approved the court closure in January 2017.
The city’s decision cited cost savings as the motivation to close the court, though McDermott was critical of Pence’s decision to appoint Jorgensen, a former chairwoman of the St. John Republican Committee, to preside over the city court.
Last year, Jorgensen filed a notice of intent to sue, arguing the council overreached its authority by closing the court. No lawsuit was ever filed.
