Nearly Nine Months After Being Abruptly Put On Leave, Volkers Will Depart

Christine Volkers

Christine Volkers

Christina Volkers will officially leave her post as San Bernardino County Superior Court executive officer on December 31, more than eight months after she was placed on administrative leave for an as yet undisclosed reason.
Volkers went out on involuntary administrative leave on April 14 and was replaced by Nancy Eberhardt, who has served ever since in the capacity of interim court executive officer. Eberhardt is to remain as the court’s top administrator, although it is not clear whether she will remain as such in an interim or permanent capacity.
What, precisely led to Volkers’ undoing is not clear. She was serving in the capacity of chief executive officer for Sacramento Superior Court in 2013 when she was brought in to replace Stephen Nash in November of that year. Nash’s exodus, in which he departed to become the CEO for Contra Costa County Superior Court, came in the midst of a consolidation push for San Bernardino County’s court system necessitated by budget cutbacks. The contraction of the courts, which over several years included shuttering courthouses in the San Bernardino Mountains, in Redlands, in Chino, and in Needles, and saw virtually all of the civil cases once heard in Rancho Cucamonga’s West Valley Courthouse transferred to the newly constructed 11-story courthouse in downtown San Bernardino in 2014, was not a popular one with the county’s residents, many of whom were put in the position of having to drive in excess of a hundred miles one way to go to court, and members of the legal profession, who likewise resented the inconvenience imposed on themselves and their clients. Upon coming to San Bernardino County, Volkers supported then-presiding judge Marsha Slough in her consolidation strategy.
A major faux pas under Volkers’ watch occurred when the Superior Court last year committed to revamping the court’s online case information system by dispensing with a fully functioning program considered to be equal to or better than that used by the courts in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Ventura counties and substituting in its stead Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey case management and information system. Upon initiating that transition in February, considerable problems manifested. Information that previously was easily and routinely available to attorneys, law enforcement agencies, governmental agencies, and common citizens was no longer accessible.
The county paid Tyler Technologies over $4 million to effectuate the change to the 3.02.20.3 Odyssey system. What happened when the criminal courts’ data was taken down on February 11 to make way for the first installment of the new system has been described, variously, as a massive computer crash or a series of recurrent and persistent mini-crashes. One report was that half of a million files which were transferred out of the old system’s data banks into version 3.02.20.3 were erased. Overnight, access to the digitized minute orders on criminal cases readily available on the old system ended.
Officials nonchalantly gave assurances that what was occurring was a normal byproduct of making such a digitized transition and that in short order technicians would “get the bugs out of” the new software and all of the information previously available in an even more easily accessible format would soon be available. But a month and then two months and then three months and then four and five months passed and the minute orders remained unavailable, and further deficiencies in the new system become apparent. Court records for hearings of criminal cases are no longer available. Follow-up information pertaining to fines paid or restitution made by defendants is no longer being entered into the system or otherwise can not be retrieved. In March, Superior Court officials acknowledged that not all elements of the information that had gone into the case management system were at that point available but that Tyler Technologies was working with court personnel “to make the criminal cases component fully operational as soon as possible.”
On April 14, Christine Volkers, as the executive officer for San Bernardino County Superior Court, was placed on administrative leave, but there has been no official statement in response to suggestions that her abrupt exodus was related to the failure of the Odyssey system.
A report has persisted that approximately 500,000 digitized criminal case files loaded into the Odyssey 3.02.20.3 version were permanently lost, that is, are unrecoverable, and that when an effort to scan just a fraction of those missing documents into the system was begun, they were “eaten,” that is, rendered into a scrambled digital form that could not be translated or unjumbled back into any semblance of their original format. It was further reported that when the court’s clerical staff was tasked with the painstaking process of reentering court documents individually into the system, several simply quit, making the pending workload ever more unwieldy.
Dennis B. Smith, the risk and safety administrator with the San Bernardino Superior Court whose tertiary assignment is media relations, announced Volkers’ departure but offered no clue as to why it was that she had been asked to leave.
Prior to her tenure in Sacramento, Volkers was from 2000 to 2009 the court administrator for the Tenth Judicial District Court in Stillwater, Minnesota. Volkers had a previous tour of duty in San Bernardino County, when she was for three years the assistant court executive officer.
It appears that delaying Volkers’ official departure until December 31, even though she is not actually on the job, will enhance her pension and give her the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere while yet maintaining the figment that she is currently employed.
When the Sentinel reached Volkers by phone at her residence in La Quinta, she declined to comment.

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