Colorado Court Reporters Association

The Bryan Shaha Scholarship Fund

Welcome to the new 2008-2009 CCRA Board

President: Joyce E. Martin
Past-President: Elaine Javernick
Vice-President: Pat Graves
Secretary/Treasurer: Kathy Davis
Director: Linda Koenig
Director: Kirstin O'Malley
Director: Erin Valenti
Director: Debra Zoetewey
Alternate Director: Lisa Kelly
Executive Director: Judi Ericson

(Joyce Martin's Incoming President's Speech)

Good Afternoon, Everyone!

It is truly an honor to be standing in front of my professional colleagues as your incoming president of the Colorado Court Reporters Association. You have put your trust in me and I will do my very best to uphold your trust and continue with the terrific leadership we have had from Elaine Javernick.

I want to make a difference in our profession. I want the Colorado Court Reporters Association to make a difference in our profession and to stand out and be noticed in Colorado. It is my desire for CCRA to build a strong alliance with the State Court Administrator’s Office and our State’s Legislature. I know I am not in this alone. We have a great team of CCRA officers and directors, and I am counting on each of you to join me in making our association strong.

Why be engaged in your professional association? Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Every man owes a part of his time and money to the business or industry in which he is engaged. No man has a moral right to withhold his support from an organization that is striving to improve conditions within his sphere.”

The Colorado Court Reporters Association is your association and it is committed to serving its greatest asset which is you, its members. We offer educational seminars twice a year to enable you to attain your continuing education points, to discuss problems and concerns and hopefully solutions within your field of reporting. The freelance committee sponsors a luncheon once a year for officials, freelancers, captioners, and CART providers, which not only focuses on providing you with information on issues occurring in Colorado and nationally, but also provides you the opportunity to network in a fun and informal atmosphere.

CCRA has a lobbyist who liaises with the president and the legislative chair and also acts as a representative for the board and membership. She is CCRA’s legislative watchdog and keeps us apprised of anything happening in our Legislature which affects the reporting industry and profession as a whole.

How can you become engaged in your association? We need your continued support, your commitment, and your ideas. I’m sure many of you have creative and innovative ideas that would greatly benefit any of CCRA’s committees. I strongly encourage you to communicate your ideas and concerns to me personally or to any of CCRA’s board members. We are looking for volunteers for our convention committee. Do you have an idea you would like to see presented for future seminars? Volunteer for our convention committee. After all, this is your association.

Declining membership is one of CCRA’s biggest challenges. We will be launching a state-wide membership drive in order to lure reporters back as members and encourage them to get involved. We will be asking for your help and commitment to achieve our goal of increasing CCRA’s membership. We have captioners, CART providers, officials, and freelance reporters. Each of us makes an individual contribution and has a positive impact in each of our fields of reporting.

You can become engaged by volunteering for pro bono jobs through our pro bono committee or serving on our student committee by mentoring and encouraging a student through their journey of becoming a professional court reporter. We encourage you to volunteer for the many committees CCRA has to offer its members.

In the last couple years, Colorado has received some negative media attention regarding court reporters. I want CCRA to now move forward and educate the media and general public about the positive attributes of court reporters. One way we can do this is by volunteering to transcribe veterans’ stories for the Veterans History Project. I would like to see articles published about the positive contributions of court reporters in our community. When we look good individually, we look good collectively.

Most of all, we need your attitudes to reflect positively on the court reporting profession. We can do that by providing realtime in our courtrooms or for attorneys in depositions. The only thing that separates us from electronic recording, whether in the courtroom or freelance arena, is our ability to provide realtime reporting, converting voice to text instantaneously. Realtime reporting has become the gold standard.

You can become engaged in the Colorado Court Reporters Association by being a leader in your working environment and community, being excited about the career path you have chosen, and by encouraging others to join and become involved and engaged in the Colorado Court Reporters Association.

Dwight Eisenhower said, “Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.”

I challenge you to enlist at least one person to join CCRA this next year, and I also challenge each one of you to become engaged in your association, the Colorado Court Reporters Association. I sincerely look forward to working with all of you during this next year.

Thank you.

New Certification Information

In December 2005, over 150 of the members of CCRA responded to a survey asking about certification for reporters of our state. 146 members said yes to supporting the idea of requiring certification for a court reporter to be allowed to work in Colorado. President Carol Bazzanella’s article in this edition of Ramblings brings us up to date in the DORA process. This article will hopefully add some insight to the happenings of the past couple of months.

Requiring a reporter to become certified and maintain this certification with continuing education is unarguably beneficial to the public and would ensure professional and occupational competence. We believe this is why 146 of our members voted “yes” to the question of requiring certification.

That said, as Carol addressed in her article earlier in this edition of Ramblings, there are three criteria which must be met before obtaining a DORA recommendation. Based on these criteria, the following fears have arisen:

1) That the court reporter/ER cost analysis will be debated again during the legislative session because we bring forward this request for certification;

2) That through the application process, the instances of harm and endangerment to the public listed in the application will be brought to the forefront for discussion and scrutiny and could possibly be used by proponents of ER against court reporters;

3) That the instances of harm and endangerment to the public listed in the application all took place prior to the Chief Justice Directive being put into effect. Highlighting those instances of harm currently could damage the relationship between the State Court Administrator’s Office and CCRA;

4) ER has already been placed in courtrooms across the state because of a shortage of court reporters. The fear is that people will not be able to achieve certification in the time required, thus creating vacancies, allowing more usage of ER.

5) That there will be an elimination of the ability to work in an internship-type capacity. Certification could be required before a reporter may work.

The CCRA board met in a special session on Saturday, April 14, 2007, with our lobbyist, Amy Redfern, to address these important issues that have come up regarding the certification process. A motion was passed by the board to withdraw the DORA application at this time. A second motion was passed by the board to actively pursue certification in Colorado. The CCRA board will keep the membership informed of the progress of the certification effort.

Thank you.

Pat Graves, Legislative Chair
Joyce Martin, Officials Chair
Kathy Davis, Freelance Chair

CERTIFICATION UPDATE

CCRA has been undertaking for the past year and a half or so the process of pursuing mandatory certification of court reporters in Colorado. There was a survey that went out to the entire CCRA membership in 2005 inquiring as to what members thought about mandatory certification of reporters in Colorado. That survey came back overwhelmingly in favor of certification.

The CCRA legislative committee last year put together a Sunrise application and submitted it to DORA (Department of Regulatory Agencies) in April of 2006. CCRA received a letter dated August 15, 2006, from DORA stating that the Office of Policy and Research had received our application and that the review will be concluded prior to October 15, 2007. We had been in a holding pattern since then, until February 23, 2007, when we began receiving phone calls from DORA requesting further information.

On Friday, March 2, 2007, several board members met with Colorado’s State Court Administrator, Jerry Marroney, and Robert Holden at DORA’s offices in Denver. Robert Holden is the policy analyst with DORA that is conducting the review of CCRA's Sunrise application. Pursuant to the Colorado Sunrise Act, §24-34-104.1, C.R.S., the determination of the need for new regulation shall be based upon the following criteria:

1. Whether the unregulated practice of the occupation or profession clearly harms or endangers the health, safety or welfare of the public, and whether the potential for harm is easily recognizable and not remote or dependent on tenuous argument;

2. Whether the public needs, and can be reasonably expected to benefit from, an assurance of initial and continuing professional or occupational competence; and

3. Whether the public can be adequately protected by other means in a more cost-effective manner.

If you go to the following link: http://www.dora.state.co.us/opr/oprpublications.htm, you will see that court reporters are listed as under review. Also, there is a link on that web page to make comments on any reviews that are under way. I would encourage any of you to do so. This is a process that affects us all. You will also see the reviews that have been completed and published on other occupational groups and what those reviews look like. The review on court reporters, once it’s done, will be listed there also.

Colorado did have a certification requirement in the past. In 1925, the State of Colorado decided to regulate court reporters. There was a CSR board that had three members, all three of whom were court reporters. There was a requirement to be certified, and once you were certified, you were certified for life. That certification requirement was sunset in 1977. The sunset process is also a legislative animal which has nine different criteria. The sunset review is set by DORA for a certain time integral, say seven years or ten years. The sunset review is to see how the process has been going during that set time integral.

In 1977 the sunset review on court reporters found that in the ten years prior, there had been three complaints received on court reporters and one hearing held which resulted in the revoking of one license. The legislature felt that it wasn’t necessary to protect the public from court reporters because there was not much harm documented by complaints or disciplinary proceedings, thus it was not cost-effective for the state to maintain a CSR board.

Once the Sunrise review is completed and posted on the DORA website, CCRA will then have to decide what direction it wants to go regarding certification. Even if the DORA review recommends against certification, we can still bring proposed legislation.

So CCRA is still in the initial stages of this effort, and we still don’t know what direction this will head in. It is CCRA’s intent to work in concert with the State Court Administrator and CCRA’s lobbyist. We are following in the steps of judicial and hoping to institute something similar to what the Chief Justice Directive required of official reporters with the RPR. We are still in the process of fine-tuning this, but the vision is that obtaining the RPR and keeping the RPR in good standing is the standard for certification in Colorado. Our certification effort does not in any way contemplate mandatory CRR certification.

Please keep checking back to the web site and Ramblings for further updates.

Carol Bazzanella

NCRA Direct Member Voting

Dear State Leaders,

My name is Robert Bramanti. I'm the chairperson of the Constitution and Bylaws Committee. Some of you I have met at NCRA’s State Leadership Conference; some at past NCRA Boot Camps. To everyone, hello.

It was suggested that I follow up the Direct Member Voting discussion held at NCRA’s Leadership Conference in November with a quick update/review. And for those on the Listserve not at Leadership, hopefully this message will give you a sense of where we are with Direct Member Voting and where we hope to be in the next few months.

As you may recall, the C&B Committee has been reviewing the issue of Direct Member Voting for quite some time following the request for more information from those members attending the business meeting in 2005 in Phoenix. We’ve made good progress since then, and we have really pushed forward following the 2006 business meeting in New York.

In October, we asked NCRA to survey voting members as to their interest in a Bylaws amendment that would allow all eligible voting members who may not be present at NCRA’s annual business meeting to vote on Bylaws amendments and contested elections via a secure Web site with the results verified by a third party. Amazingly, in one week's time, 2,118 voting members responded. 1,847 members, a bit over 87 percent, were in favor of a Bylaws amendment. 166 members were not sure. And 103 members, 4.9 percent, were against a proposed amendment. At the State Leadership Conference, though there were some technical questions, some of which were addressed, there seemed to be strong support for the proposal.

Based on member interest, the C&B Committee is currently developing a proposed framework for how online voting could be accomplished. And we’ll be conducting another survey of the voting membership about that proposed framework soon to make sure we’re on the right track. To give you some idea as to the Committee’s current thinking, the proposed Direct Member Voting amendment would work roughly as follows:

All eligible voting members would be issued a user name and password to vote online via a secure Web site. A member would only be able to vote once.
Members attending the business meeting, in addition to having the ability to vote online, could choose to vote via paper ballot on-site. If they choose to vote on-site, these members would not be able to vote online. So, again, a member would only be able to vote once.
The annual business meeting would operate just as it has in the past. Any proposed amendment to the Bylaws would be presented and the members at the business meeting would have the opportunity to debate the proposal. The members present in the business meeting would have the opportunity to amend the introduced amendment. A two-thirds vote of those members present in the business meeting would be required to amend the introduced amendment.
The final amendment language, amended or not, would be posted to a secure third-party web site for all eligible voting members to vote yes or no on its passage.
A similar process would be followed for a contested election. If there are two candidates, their names would be posted to the secure web site for a vote. If there were more than two candidates, there would be a runoff during the business meeting. The names of the top two vote-getters, as determined by those members present in the business meeting, would then be posted on the secure third-party web site for a vote.
NCRA would continue to post the rough transcript of the business meeting to NCRA’s Web site shortly after the conclusion of the business meeting so that those members voting online would have the opportunity to become fully informed on the issues that were discussed during the meeting and the debate involving any amendments.
In order to give all eligible voting members the opportunity to review the text of the debate on NCRA's Web site prior to a member voting, members would have 12 hours to vote once the final amendment language or the final two candidates’ names are posted. And it should take no more than two hours after the conclusion of the business meeting to have this information posted to the NCRA site.

I should point out that the primary focus behind the currently proposed framework is to ensure that the process remains simple to implement and as inexpensive as possible. But, again, we’ll be evaluating this proposed framework following the survey in January to determine if any changes need to be made.

President Reesa Parker's stated mission has been enhanced customer service to you, the members. The C & B Committee believes Direct Member Voting plays a big part in that improved customer service, as it provides more members with an opportunity to become empowered and involved. Put simply, in our opinion, it gives more members a voice.

As I mentioned, the C&B Committee will continue to examine the issue and revise the proposed process for conducting Direct Member Voting as we receive member input. So if you’d like to discuss any aspect of Direct Member Voting, please feel free to contact me directly at rbramanti@comcast.net.

Thank you.

Robert M. Bramanti, CSR, RMR
C & B Chairperson
617.723.7321

AMENDMENT 40

Amendment 40 seeks to change the constitution to limit the time that judges who sit on the Colorado Supreme Court and the Colorado Court of Appeals can serve. With this amendment, judges on those two courts would sit for a two-year provisional term, followed by two four-year terms. The amendment would require all judges on these two courts to leave after 10 years, regardless of quality of services or voter preference. This amendment is bad for Colorado and the justice system. For that reason, the Colorado Court Reporters Association Executive Committee has decided to support the Colorado Bar Association in its opposition to Amendment 40. CCRA has donated $1,000 to this cause.

Amendment 40 is retroactive and would apply to judges presently sitting on those courts. As a result of the retroactivity, five of the seven Colorado Supreme Court justices and seven judges on the Colorado Court of Appeals would be automatically term-limited out of their positions at the next general election in 2008. If it passes, 71% of the Colorado Supreme Court Justices and 37% of the Court of Appeals Judges will be forced out at the same time, including those judges who the voters previously voted to retain. This would have a devastating effect on our judicial system and would hurt the members of the public that those courts serve.

Our system already has accountability. Colorado judges are presently subject to a detailed and lengthy selection process. Then, after being selected they are continually subject to reviews by non-partisan judicial nominating commissions, disciplinary controls, regular state-wide retention elections, and mandatory retirement at age 72.

The current system allows an independent judiciary to check the power of elected officials. This measure increases the power of a few politicians at the expense of a fair judiciary. Every 10 years, one governor will have the ability to replace a majority of judges on the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. This will encourage court-packing from one side or the other of the political spectrum and will make judicial appointments a centerpiece of future elections, further dragging the judiciary into the political process.

Right now, voters have a choice – they can vote to retain or not retain any judge. This amendment will take away that choice and will force all judges to leave the bench after 10 years. It will cause delay, lessen judicial experience, weaken the consistency of judicial precedent, and shrink the applicant pool. This amendment is also bad for court reporters. While the present amendment only impacts the appellate judiciary, term limits for trial court judges is likely not far behind. Obviously, unnecessary turn-over on the trial court level will have a direct impact on the quality and security of employment for our official members.