Q/A: A view from Pueblo’s municipal bench
New municipal judge Carla Sikes sees some of Pueblo’s biggest issues reflected in the court: a strained police force and poverty.
Municipal Judge Carla Sikes has been on the bench for two months, and was slated as the favorite for the seat when Pueblo City Council interviewed five candidates in April. While some candidates brought outside experience or deep family ties in Pueblo, Sikes wooed council with her most recent work in the city attorney office where she represented several departments such as the police department and code enforcement. She also worked on personnel issues.
Sikes said her prior position gave her the advantage through contacts and connections with other city departments and local unions. Other candidates promised being seen in the community and said they expected honesty and communication from other employees and departments. Sikes went straight for thoroughness, adding she would run an efficient court. For her the building blocks were already in place.
But that doesn’t omit a learning curve, as municipal court feels the pressure from council’s focus on blight, an understaffed police force and a population that isn’t always able to pay fines. The following is an edited interview with the judge.
During your job interview with Pueblo City Council you said two problems facing the city are an aging population and a poor population. That being said, how do you make your court effective?
The court can’t necessarily address those problems, obviously. I think anybody who violates the law needs to have the same consequences. So we assign consequences to certain behavior. Those are the same consequences whether you’re old or young or wealthy or poor. But we have to be sensitive to those issues. For instance, we make community service more available in our court than other communities. Even just on a fine people have the option of a payment system or working it off through community service. That’s to address our low-income population that doesn’t have the money to pay a fine.
One of the reasons the tickets have declined to some extent is because we don’t have a fully staffed police force. But a direct impact is when officers can’t make it to trial because they’re out on a call. We have some of those issues.
Speaking of fines. You also said during that interview the collection of more fines would mean more programs. Council’s ears seemed to perk at that.
It all comes down to revenue. Certainly my philosophy is not that the municipal court is here to generate money for the city. The job is to assign consequences for certain behavior. But one of the things our success is gauged by is how much we bring in revenue because the consequence we assign most often is fines. That’s just a sort of benchmark. We can assess fines, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we collect all of them.
We have a pretty strong collection system in place. We contract with the state collections and they have a lot of ability to garnish wages. They take tax returns. They can put holds on people’s licenses. As long as they’re making an effort to pay the fine, we’re not going to take any action on those people.
I’d like to see our success seen in terms of people graduating from programs or how much community service is being done, or people who’ve been deterred because of the fines. But that’s a lot harder to quantify.
Do you feel the effects of not having a fully staffed police force?
One of the reasons the tickets have declined to some extent is because we don’t have a fully staffed police force. But a direct impact is when officers can’t make it to trial because they’re out on a call. We have some of those issues.
There seems to be this desire for the municipal court to be more involved in the community. Some of that comes from your community service. Is there another obvious way to get more involved?
Well, I want to be real involved in the community. I want us to be real visible. But as far as being a group that is more involved… That’s a real hard question. Municipal court works more cooperatively with county court and the district court and the DA’s office and trying to participate in their programs, particularly for juveniles. It all comes down to resources. We’d love to offer more programs. We’re working with those other agencies because we don’t always have those resources to try and do more things.
So the main attention on municipal court is maybe Pueblo’s blight. People have daisy chained blight, code enforcement and the municipal court together. Councilwoman Lori Winner said during the judge interviews she’d like to see a proactive approach to code enforcement. Is that doable?
I can’t speak to code enforcement, per se. I know a lot about it, but I won’t speak to it. As far as the court is concerned, councilman (Ray) Aguilera has talked about alley cleanups and things like that. We could potentially address that threw our community service crews. Part of the thing we struggle with is having a consistent flow of community service workers. Yesterday we had nobody show up to adult community service.
