Does Anyone Appreciate the Gravity of this Situation?

Many of the people on this e-mail list have ties to real estate, banking, title companies, government, business, etc., so I forward this bizarre letter for your information.

The attached letter from Brevard County Court Administration is fairly brief without elaboration. The Courts will not be certifying civilian process servers anymore, no reason given.

I will be checking on this tomorrow at work. If there has been a change in the Florida Statutes governing the certification of civilian process servers then it’s a huge error and needs correction ASAP when the Legislature next meets (probably the next special session to get the expenditures back in line with the real revenue as it declines).

Other than a statute change, nothing has happened within the courts to create this. Court Administration lost a few people, mostly within Family Court support, and virtually their entire Administrative staff is intact. In the Clerk’s Office we have lost a number of people through attrition, including voluntary layoffs, but we still support the badging system for the process servers.

Let me please elaborate on the importance of this issue.

Civilian Process Servers and the Brevard County Sheriff’s Officer serve thousands of subpoeanas every month, probably tens of thousands. The Sheriff handles many of our tougher cases, such as Request for Injunctions, as well as Evictions, etc. Civilian Process Servers handle the subpoenas of thousands of witness and parties in civil litigation, as well as the parties in the currently 750+ foreclosures we are handling every month. The civilian process servers are critical to fill a job impossible for the Sheriff to undertake completely.

If we begin losing the civilian process servers either the Sheriff will have to pull in dozens of deputies to serve them or the courts will begin grinding into slow motion. This will be a major disruption.

I surely expect this is not some kind of crying of budget poor after the small reductions the State has made. This is clearly a duty of the great importance to the court system. I know often government agencies tend to react to small cuts by inflicting the most pain on the public rather than on the upper echelons of the office or simply spreading workloads to ensure all duties are accomplished, albeit a bit slower, perhaps. Let us hope this is not an action of that kind.