TO:	Honorable John Whitmire, Chair, Senate Committee on Criminal Justice
FROM:	Jerry McGinty, Director, Legislative Budget Board
IN RE:	HB1182 by Harless (Relating to judicial statistics and other pertinent information, including landlord and tenant dispute information, gathered by or reported to the Texas Judicial Council and certain populous counties.), As Engrossed

General Revenue-Related Funds, Five- Year Impact:

All Funds, Five-Year Impact:

Fiscal Analysis

The bill would require the Office of Court Administration (OCA) to gather monthly court activity statistics by each trial court as part of its data collection duties. The bill would also require the agency to collect landlord and tenant dispute information as part of the reporting requirements. The bill would require the Texas Judicial Council to adopt rules necessary to implement the provisions of the bill.

The bill would take effect September 1, 2023.

Methodology

Costs reflected in the table above are based on the original analysis provided by OCA.

This analysis assumes OCA would need to replace its Court Activity Reporting Database, a legacy information technology system that currently only allows for aggregate data collection, to capture the data required by the bill. To address cybersecurity vulnerabilities and to allow courts to report data in near real time, the new system would be a vendor-hosted, cloud-based system. OCA estimates the cost for the new system to be $6,000,000 in General Revenue in the 2024-25 biennium, including $4,000,000 in fiscal year 2024 and $2,000,000 in fiscal year 2025. OCA also estimates that $2,000,000 each subsequent year would be necessary for maintaining the system.

Technology

OCA anticipates a cost of $4,000,000 in fiscal year 2024 and $2,000,000 in fiscal year 2025 to acquire the necessary information resource technologies to collect, store, and process case-level data as required by the bill. This includes the vendor-hosted, cloud-based system to allow each court to report data and business intelligence platforms to manipulate the data to answer policy questions by the Judicial Council and the Legislature.

Local Government Impact

While there may be a cost to local governments to provide the data required due to modification of court case management systems, OCA anticipates that most court clerks' case management contracts with vendors include provisions that do not require payment when there are state-mandated reporting changes. Any costs would vary by jurisdiction due to these differences by county.