JP Salaries

You should know this if you are a voter but you probably don't.

First you don't have to be an attorney to be a Justice of the Peace. I know, it boggles the mind that someone who will make a legal judgment doesn't actually have to be trained in the law but thats how we roll in Texas.

Second, and probably even more infuriating is that JP's charge a fee to marry someone and the county tax-payers don't see a dime of that revenue. Its sort of a JP's personal little slush fund. In fact, I doubt they even need to track or disclose how much they make on that service. I'll get to that in a minute.

Currently only one of the JP's is actually an attorney. I suppose there's probably a good investigative piece in the works for anyone who actually wants to do some digging and found out how often decisions of JP's are reversed and what the cost to tax payers is.

County Judge Veronica Escobar is proposing cutting the salary of JP's but offering a different pay system for JP's that are actually lawyers. I'm not entirely sure that can actually be done. I've never heard of an elected position having a different salary based on education but I could be wrong about that.

I think there are other problems one has to consider. First, you might end up with the Socorro Municipal Judge problem they had a couple of years ago. Socorro used to let just anyone be a municipal judge. You basically just had to be a friend of whoever was mayor or enough members of council. Eventually that was fixed and a previous council changed the City Charter to require that the Municipal Judge at least have a law degree.

They didn't require that the judge actually pass the bar exam and they had some guy who had a very cozy relationship with Jesse Gandara serve as municipal judge. He failed twice to pass the bar but because he was Jesse's boy he ended up with some ridiculous contract that required something stupid like 9 months notice if city council was going to let him go.

Absolutely stupid contract, but thats Jesse Gandara for you. By the way, I guess he stopped writing his blog, which is interesting because its been a while since I've seen one of his shitty YouTube videos.

So does the proposed salary difference mean you just have to have a JD or actually have had to pass the bar exam?

There's no education requirements for most elected officials except real judges. So it seems impossible, at least politically, to impose an education incentive for JP's and not the rest of the county elected officials.

But I think Judge Escobar is on the right track. The JP's are in need of reform. Ultimately there really is a system already in place that incentives people to run for office. The electorate.

They ultimately decide if a candidate is worthy or not to hold office. The fix is simple. When there is enough political will, a group of savvy political operatives will start replacing the JP's that aren't attorneys. Its not a matter of if, its a matter of when.

That is really the only thing that has allowed non-lawyers win. Attorneys in general make pretty shitty candidates. They can't help but act like they are in a courtroom. They over-articulate and are terrible about leveraging a message. And don't even get me started on their crappy ground games. JP's are one of the easiest races to win, which is why someone like Barbara Perez was able to take out a field of 3 opponents that were attorneys. And honestly, she's got a reputation for being a mediocre campaigner at best. She prefers to mail and endorse her way to a win.

The reason that Texas allows non-lawyers to be JP's is because of the expanse of Texas and so much of it being rural. In rural counties there simply may not be any attorneys. If the requirement is that you be an attorney but none live in the county, then you are in quite the legal quandary. So the fix for that is to remove the requirement of being an attorney.

But the legislative remedy is rather simple. All it takes is a bill that says in counties with populations larger than X amount of people that there is a requirement to be an attorney. Hell even in the unlikely event that a large county doesn't have an attorney living in the area or willing to run, then an exception can be made in those cases.

Its really not that hard.

Sorry, I went off on a tangent.

The JP slush-fund; a dirty little secret

Lets get back to the slush fund. JP's are able to marry people and they have turned it into quite the lucrative enterprise. Its better side-job money than constables get. A JP can pretty much charge what they want to marry someone. The only reason they are able to do so is because of their elective office and county tax-payers never see a dime of those funds.

So when you think about cuts or the needs of departments that go unmet, or worse when you see the JP's go to Commissioners Court to ask for more money, keep in mind that they have a personal slush-fund at their disposal.

A few JP's will be reading this and probably are pretty upset, but what I am saying is 100% true. They make a ton of money marrying people. Hell some of them are so upfront about it that they offer packages and even have structures set-up in their courtroom for photo ops.

Thats revenue that is available to be captured, at least in part, by tax-payers. We deserve a piece of the action because but for the sake of them being elected officials by the people of El Paso County, they would not even have the authority to perform said duty.

They use county staff to support the marriage operations. They use the county facilities to perform the ceremonies, unless of course they are performing the ceremony at another location. Of course they charge extra for that. They use the electricity tax payers fund to keep the building at a comfortable temperature for said occasion.

And yet the public is not compensated. Nor are the JP's really transparent about exactly how much revenue they make off of that enterprise.

That is the kind of tax-payer relief the public should be looking at. Getting a piece of the marriage business will provide fare more relief than lowering the salaries of elected officials. At best, lowering the salaries of electeds is a one-time modest benefit to tax payers. But being able to capture a piece of revenue that will always be available is a far better financial decision for the benefit of tax payers.

UNRELATED SIDEBAR – if you can get married on a whim and basically get married in a day, I think you should be able to undo that mistake in one day as well. Its only fair.