{Frankfort, Kentucky}...The General Assembly authorized 70 courthouse construction projects costing $816 million between 1998 and 2008. The budget for 2007-08, passed in 2006, gave the judicial branch $279 million. The budget for 2013-14 appropriates $316 million. For the courts, the added costs for the new courthouses exceeded the appropriations, and state spending on courthouse buildings is going up. State budgets show a boom in courthouse building spending from 1998 to 2008 that has resulted in the doubling of costs for debt service and related costs for buildings. Kentucky is spending $122 million this fiscal year on debt service and related costs for buildings, which is double the $61 million spent in 2007. Chief Justice John Minton Jr. and his predecessor, Joseph Lambert, who presided over the branch during the building boom, say the exploding cost for paying off the new courthouses is not the reason for the furloughs and other cuts Minton has ordered to balance his operating budget. Senator Bob Leeper, the Paducah independent who heads the Senate budget committee, says, anytime you create a fixed cost in the spending base, which all of the courthouse construction has done, there's simply less money available for anything else. Minton says the new courthouses, built to last 100 years, will be a long-term value, and there was not a courthouse built in any community that wasn't needed.
