CCRA ALERT

ACTION NEEDED!


As you are all aware, the State of California's budget process is in shambles. As part of the Governor's plan to reduce the size of government, the Governor has directed his staff to impose a series of reorganizations in various areas, including elimination of the Court Reporters Board. No information has been provided regarding the procedure by which this action would take place, whether it would be through a trailer bill or through the regular budget hearing process.

In the reorganization proposal, the Court Reporters Board would be eliminated, with oversight of "official" (court-employed) reporters transferred to the State Bar and no oversight of deposition or "freelance" reporters. CCRA has met with the Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), and it was agreed that licensure should remain a requirement for California CSRs, but no clear plan was proposed how to accomplish this task.

I am asking you today to write the Governor's office to support CCRA in fighting to maintain the Court Reporters Board and to express your concerns regarding how the elimination of the board would affect you. The Department of Consumer Affairs has set a deadline of Feb. 1 for putting together a written proposal of how to eliminate the CR Board along with 16 other boards under their umbrella. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. Please ask all your colleagues, family, friends, judges, attorneys, anyone willing to write a letter on behalf of all court reporters in California. A sample letter is included below.

The state's judiciary and those citizens that must use it risk a reduced quality in the way the official record is made without any real justification for the change and without having some idea how a new system would work.

Thank you,

Sheri Turner Gray
President


Direct letters by U.S. Mail or fax to:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol, First Floor
Sacramento, California 95814
Attn: Ms. Susan Kennedy,
Chief-of-Staff
(fax) 916-324-6358


Dear Governor,

I am urging you not to pursue elimination of the California Court Reporters Board (CRB). Because the Court Reporters Board is funded solely by funds generated by its licensees, there is no cost savings to the state's General Fund by dismantling the board. Further, the board, as well as other consumer boards and commissions under the Department
of Consumer Affairs, makes an annual contribution to help pay for the costs of running
the department.

The state is actually losing money while eliminating a watchdog group over the court reporting industry that has proved itself to be very effective in resolving disputes, developing and administering examinations for new reporters, upholding professional standards, providing accreditation of court reporter schools to ensure a viable supply of qualified reporters to serve the needs of the judicial system, regulating consumer protections, and administering the Transcript Reimbursement Fund for indigent litigants; all functions of the CRB and all funded by license fees.

The state's judiciary and those citizens that must use it risk a reduced quality in the way the official record is made without any real justification for the change and without having some idea how a new system would work.

Please remove the elimination of the California Court Reporters Board from your proposal.

Sincerely,




CCRA - Advancing our profession for over 100 years!


California Court Reporters Association
65 Enterprise
Aliso Viejo, CA 92656
949-715-4682 949-715-6931 fax
staff@cal-ccra.org

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Replies to This Discussion

It's kind of scary, the thought of an ungoverned reporting profession. I'm from Ohio, where there's no state test and no governing of reporters. And the agency I worked for right out of school forced me to take jobs that I wasn't ready for, i.e., bankruptcy court, commission hearings of all kinds, meetings, etc. He required us to tape record everything, knowing we weren't ready to take what we were taking. Sure enough, my audio would fail me occasionally, and I'd be up late, late at night trying to make sense of a sentence that I'd written poorly and some of which I'd dropped. Not to mention the varying page formats, with some agencies putting fewer and fewer characters per line and lines per page.

If you choose to write to the Governator, please keep in mind that he's not an attorney, never has been, and has no idea of the ramifications of leaving our profession ungoverned. Give him some specific examples of what might come to be, the possible negative outcome this decision might have on Californians.

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