Auburn’s leaders have been contemplating a heavy question of late concerning court services.

That is, should the city continue to contract with King County District Court to provide court services here as it has been doing since 2012, or set up its own municipal court again?

KCDC Presiding Judge Rebecca Robertson told city leaders last year that she had to have the city’s answer by Feb. 1 2o25, but the deadline came and went without an answer.

On March 31, Candis Martinson, Director of Human Resource and Risk Management for Auburn, informed the City Auburn Council that the presiding judge has since extended the deadline to May 12, 2025.

Two municipal court studies have been done, the original and an update, with the latest financial figures for council members to study before any potential vote on the city staying with the county or going its own way. Martinson said that KCDC gave no indication in the months leading up to the Feb. 1 deadline that it would ask of the city what it is now asking: to assume full responsibility for probation services.

Martinson noted that probationary services were among those listed in the city’s costs in the original interlocal agreement between the City of Auburn and KCDC 13 years ago.

“I was informed in a meeting in March by King County District Court staff and the presiding judge that there is a budget shortfall for King County, and one of the proposed solutions was to transfer the probation services back to the municipalities,” Martinson explained.

“And it was shared with me that King County District Court is looking for a full-cost recovery model,” Martinson continued, noting that, preliminarily, “we are looking at a $514,000 charge before overhead costs for our probation services in addition to the costs that we pay per the interlocal agreement for municipal court services.”

In the current interlocal agreement, KCDC bills the city for a limited number of clerks and judges. A new wrinkle is that more staff work in the courthouse than were spelled out in the interlocal agreement.

Martinson said a case weighting study will be done at a date yet to be determined, so it would be reasonable to anticipate that if King County is keen on a full-cost recovery model, that the two probationary officers and additional clerks who work in the courthouse on any Auburn cases would now be charged to the city.

Case weighting is the process of assigning greater and lesser value to different case types, corresponding to the greater and lesser amount of time involved, and tallying those case-weight values to calculate an attorney’s caseload.

“From my perspective, that means any cost savings we were experiencing from moving to the King County District Court in a contract for court services most likely will not be realized any more, but we would essentially be paying for the full cost of court services,” Martinson said.

Auburn is 50 percent of King County District Court’s probation budget, Martinson said, and Bellevue, the other larger city that contracts with King County for district court services, has its own probation services that are run out of its human services department.

“Bellevue is doing a lot of the human services work that our human services department is doing for people involved in the criminal justice system. They did not have a community court previously, so they are standing one up very soon. We felt like there may be an opportunity for us to explore potentially providing probation services ourselves at a minimum like Bellevue is,” Martinson said.