L.A. Courthouses Crumble With ‘Run to Failure’ Maintenance

Water valves burst at the Compton Courthouse in Los Angeles on New Year’s weekend 2024, quietly flooding the elevators, stairwells, and a jury room.

The flood forced the courthouse shut for days as crews scrambled to repair the pipes and clean the almost 50-year-old facility that houses 31 courtrooms.

Roughly 100 court patrons stood outside the building, waiting for court staff with master calendars on clipboards to tell them what to do after the floods were discovered, according to Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles attorney Brianna Aguet. Judges, attorneys, clerks, and bailiffs sat at tables around the building’s entrance, in a makeshift “lobby court,” hearing the few cases that weren’t moved or put on hold.

Bench warrants were later issued for some who missed appearances that had been rescheduled and moved to other courthouses across the county, some up to an hour away, according to Assistant Public Defender Candis Glover.

Then, valves broke again over the last weekend of January, triggering the second major flood in a month.

Roughly 5,000 cases were impacted over 11 days of closures that month, according to court operations staff estimates. The state of California was invoiced nearly $2.6 million for emergency maintenance at Compton after the duo of floods in January and a smaller one in 2023, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg Law. The flood disrupted the lives of those who use the courthouse for everything from traffic ticket appearances to evictions to divorce hearings.

But courthouses across L.A. County are crumbling, not just in Compton.

The California Judicial Council, which handles court facilities across the state, says low resources from squeezed California budgets have forced it to adopt a “run to failure” method of maintenance.

“You just wait until something fails, and then you go fix it,” said Pella McCormick, the director of the council’s facilities services office. In Compton’s case, “it came at a high price.”

Priciest Fixes Total $6 Million

Many individual work orders to fix the county’s courthouses exceeded $100,000 in 2023 and the first quarter of 2024. During that period, the state paid or was invoiced more than $6 million on those 16 expensive work orders, according to public records obtained by Bloomberg Law.

“We’re probably, at the end of the day, spending more on trying to keep this operational than we would on a bond that would build the new building,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Executive Officer David Slayton said.

L.A. Courts’ Most Expensive Work Orders

Renovation of the courthouse in Compton is only a medium priority in the county’s long-range plans. Of the county’s 36 courthouses, Slayton said, 19 are past their 50-year lifespans and 13 are near the end.

The chronic troubles at Compton caused Aguet to wonder: “If Compton’s at a ‘medium,’ what’s at a ‘high’?”

One answer is the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, L.A.'s flagship criminal courthouse.

Among Foltz’s recently documented woes: a continuously overflowing toilet that leaked from the 18th floor to the 11th floor, part of a chorus of plumbing failures that necessitated, among other outcomes, the removal of 10,000 gallons of water from the courthouse’s elevator pits.

Floods in Foltz disturb asbestos, lead, and carcinogenic chemicals in the building, so sections of it must be sealed off until the hazardous material is removed, according to LASC documents. Floods also forced the District Attorney’s office to move out of its Foltz headquarters in 2022.

The California Superior Court, County of Los Angeles told the California Judicial Council in April that Foltz needs to be fully replaced, rather than just renovated. It’s one of seven courthouse locations the L.A. court identified in 2024 as having an “immediate” or “critical” need for major construction work.

The Judicial Council prioritizes facilities for replacement and renovation based on cost, physical condition, security, overcrowding, and judge workloads, as well as earthquake safety, according to a ranking model updated in 2019.

The county’s highest-traffic courthouses are some of the least seismically safe in the state, officials say.

“Each of these courthouses have huge problems that we put a patchy repair on and just say it’s going to work until it doesn’t,” Aguet said. “And when it doesn’t, there’s going to be huge issues that stem from it.”

Source: Superior Court public notice

The state legislature only grants funding for a few new courthouses a year, when money isn’t tight. It leaves nearly 10 million residents to rely on court infrastructure in L.A. County that often isn’t usable or safe.

It would take around 160 years to replace all of California’s courthouses at that rate, Slayton said. Meanwhile, it would take roughly $5 billion just to clear California’s backlog of maintenance requests, said McCormick, from the Judicial Council.

“The legislature has to make choices—do they put buildings first, or do they put people first?” McCormick said. “Most of the time, they choose people.”

Modern Solutions

It’s hard to situate state courthouse maintenance trends across the country because data isn’t consolidated, said Nathan Hall, an architect and consultant with the National Center for State Courts.

The NCSC, a leading state court research hub, can’t track precisely how many state courthouses are in the US—much less what condition they’re in—because states and municipalities aren’t required to report those numbers. State court systems use different funding structures and delegate responsibility for facilities differently.

Still, “it’s pretty easy to align the challenges of new courthouse facilities with the rising costs and the finite resources that local governments are dealing with,” Hall said. “If you have to choose between your level of public safety, and parks, and jails, and clean water, and all sorts of things, that’s what courts are competing with.”

Courthouses are uniquely difficult to construct because the buildings are specialized. But as the legal system modernizes—the California Judicial Council this year approved a set of guidelines for judges to preside remotely over civil cases in limited circumstances—construction plans should too, said Shay Cleary, the managing director of the National Center for State Courts.

Changes could include building smaller courthouses that use technology more efficiently, or regionalizing some court functions based on data, Cleary said.

For example, small claims, traffic, and landlord-tenant litigants check in at kiosks and receive orientations on video monitors to shorten their wait times at the 44-courtroom Multnomah County Central Courthouse in Portland, completed in 2020.

And in the 78-courtroom Marion County Community Justice Campus in Indianapolis, completed in 2022, judicial officers are assigned to courtrooms on an as-needed basis. The building has fewer courtrooms than judges, and used a statistical history to determine it needed to reduce the number of jury courtrooms and increase the number of hearing rooms.

“A small percentage of cases actually go to trial. And yet, courthouses traditionally were built with every courtroom having a jury box, and every judge having a chambers and potentially their own bathroom,” Cleary said. “People are starting to look at things differently, and that does open up some opportunities for rethinking and replacing a traditional courthouse.”

Seismic Safety

The most existential threat faced by the Los Angeles courthouses, one that would make the asbestos-leaking walls and toilets that gush sewage feel like a mere nuisance, is the earthquake. A magnitude 4.7 earthquake jolted the L.A. region Sept. 12, continuing a string of summer temblors that has left residents uneasy.

In the case of a major earthquake, the human toll could be devastating.

One that hits near the county’s flagship civil courthouse during work hours could cause the entire building to collapse, endangering the more than 2,500 people in the Stanley Mosk Courthouse on any given court day, Slayton said.

The expense would be “colossal,” said Ken Cooley, a former Democratic member of the California State Assembly, who helped lead the seismic safety commission.

Many of the county’s court facilities were built prior to 1971, when the San Fernando earthquake expanded engineers’ understanding of seismically safe building design, said UCLA professor Tom Sabol, who has worked on courthouse seismic ratings.

Of course, many of the state’s other public buildings are rated similarly to court buildings for earthquake performance, Sabol said. Still, courts are among the highest-utilized public facilities in the state, so seismic damage there could impact a broader share of the population, Cooley said.

Alongside safety concerns, there are functional concerns.

Removing a mass of wreckage is expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous, Cooley said. After the Long Beach earthquake in 1933 destroyed the Red Sandstone Courthouse, downtown L.A. was without a courthouse for 25 years.

“Imagine that happening now,” Slayton said. “If Mosk were to be damaged beyond repair, all those 100 courtrooms, where would they go? Where would the litigants who now come downtown to take care of their business go?”