It is a particular point of controversy within Erie County that the state, through the Office of Court Administration, has required improved court facilities but the county has not yet met the state deadline for submission of a proposal for a new facility. At the end of 1994, a local advisory committee established by the Erie County Legislature submitted a proposal to the State Legislature which was not accepted. More recently the County Legislature has been unable to secure the site it selected for construction of the new court facility. Compounding the complexity of the issue are objections from the City of Buffalo to the particular site selected by County Legislators. The court facility picture remains clouded as Erie County faces a state deadline for a facilities plan extended to July 1995.
Revenues generated by the courts include bail, various fees, and fines.
At the Town and Village Court level, a particularly interesting factor is the division of fines between the municipality and the state, depending of the nature of the offense. There is a genuine incentive in the plea bargaining process for municipal Justice Courts to, for example, reduce a Vehicle and Traffic charge from a moving violation to a parking violation, for which the locality may retain fines. Indeed, this source of municipal revenue amounts to many thousands of dollars in smaller towns and villages, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in larger towns such as Amherst. Although severely restricted by the statewide constitutional structure for the judicial branch of government, there nevertheless exists a series of important issues pertaining to court services in the Western New York region and Erie County in particular. In the Long Island model the principle of efficiency through municipal collaborations has been taken to a more dramatic extent with the District Court structure utilized in lieu of town and village courts altogether.