While it could have been the first step on the road toward municipal consolidation, it seems as though a proposal to combine the village and town courts in Ellenville and Wawarsing will remain in judge's chambers — at least for now. Village Mayor Jeff Kaplan suggested at March 10's joint municipal meeting that Ellenville and the town of Wawarsing's justice court be merged into one and held in Ellenville's Government Center as a way of sharing services between the two municipalities, a move that would consolidate town and village services while ostensibly saving space and money for both municipalities.

"One of the greatest revenue sources of the court is when you have a police department right within the area you are policing," says Kaplan. "The justice court in Ellenville generates a lot of revenue because of the fact that there's a local police writing tickets, and they're all returnable right there in Ellenville, so there'd be an additional revenue source [for the town]." Kaplan estimates that the village court costs around $70,000 to operate, and that its annual revenue is usually either "plus or minus" that number.

Mayor Kaplan's proposal would have required that village and town officials sit and determine the town's current court costs while adding whatever additional costs the court would incur, such as possible raises for judges who would handle two jurisdictions instead of one. These higher costs would be offset by the projected increase in revenue the town court could gain from fines and fees collected from village code violations. The two municipalities would determine a rent-fee that the town would pay to the village for use of their building that would come from the added village-violation revenues.

"It would cost [the town] zero dollars, and in fact, they would make money on it because we would not allow the rent to be beyond the anticipated revenues versus expenditures taken into account what they make already," says Kaplan of the idea.

Those in favor of the idea have speculated moving town court to the government center could potentially allow town officials to make more use out of their second floor, where town court is currently held. This would also give the town even greater opportunity to utilize their unoccupied third floor, which is tentatively slated to become the town court's new home after the floor's planned renovation.

Current Town Justice Wayne Lonstein and Village Justice Matt Parker are reluctant to weigh in regarding the possibilities of merged courts because of a potential conflict of interest, but Judge Parker agrees with Mayor Kaplan that the village court currently tends to pay for itself with a little extra revenue. However, Parker says that if Ellenville's board of trustees establishes the recently proposed committee to investigate village-dissolution possibilities, then combining the courts ought to be one of the issues that they examine.

"They have already talked about having a committee to decide whether or not to dissolve the village," says Parker. "If that's what they're going to do, why not have the committee look into it? It would only make sense to me. They're going to look at all aspects of the question, so if that's what they're going to do, then why shouldn't they just look into it and deal with it?"

So far, town council members have indicated that they've not discussed the concept of court consolidation when asked at the most recent town board meeting, making Kaplan's proposal seem that much more out of reach. Be that as it may, the mayor still believes that merging the courts would be a win-win situation for both municipalities, and intends to ask the town council to give the idea more consideration.

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When initially proposing the idea at the joint municipal meeting, Mayor Kaplan mentioned the town and village of New Paltz's shared court system as a point of comparison. According to New Paltz's court clerk, Rebecca Seward, the two municipalities' courts have always been one.

Seward reports that keeping each municipality's fees and fines separate from each other is as simple as seeing where the violation took place, and which municipality's code was broken.

A similar proposal for court consolidation took place in New York's Washington County between the village of Hudson Falls and the town of Kingsbury in January of this year. According to an article in the Post Star newspaper, when put to public referendum, the court consolidation was voted down despite the residents' apparent desire to save money. Like Ellenville and Wawarsing, the two Washington County municipalities are also discussing the possibility of village dissolution and consolidation of services, seemingly solid evidence that multi-layered governments are causing problems across the state.

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