Bipartisan opposition and a looming lawsuit follow a vote to eliminate three associate judge positions
RICHMOND, Texas — Fort Bend County Commissioners Court voted Thursday to cut three of the county’s eight associate judge positions, after nearly two hours of public testimony and unified opposition from the county’s district judges, Republicans and Democrats alike.
The fight isn’t over. The Fort Bend District Board of Judges, the collective body made up of all the county’s sitting district judges, which handles administrative matters for the district court system such as appointing associate judges and overseeing the county auditor, met Friday and agreed to return to Commissioners Court on Sept. 10 to push for full funding during ongoing budget talks. If Commissioners Court members Daniel Wong, Andy Meyers and Vincent Morales don’t restore the positions, the judges say they will sue the county.
What judges said Thursday
Associate Judge Stuti Patel, who serves the 400th District Court, delivered some of the sharpest pushback of the hearing. She said the Texas Office of Court Administration report the county cited to justify the cuts is more than two years old, and that OCA itself emailed her acknowledging its current reporting “does not show these cases and may not represent true, accurate, or transparent numbers.” Patel countered with a fresh OCA report from that same week showing Fort Bend County courts earned an A+ clearance rating.
Patel and other judges also said the cuts caught them off guard procedurally. The budgets they had already received in writing for next fiscal year included the associate judge positions, they said; the elimination appeared only later, on the commissioners’ agenda. Patel said county staff told her directly that cutting the positions isn’t necessary to balance the budget.
“Budgetary power cannot become judicial power,” said Judge Maggie Jaramillo of the 458th District Court, who stressed the issue crosses party lines. “This is not a partisan issue. This is completely nonpartisan. Every judge has signed that letter agreeing for the retention of our associate judges.”
Judge Monica Rawlins of the 328th District Court said she learned of the proposed cuts with no advance warning. “We were not provided proper notice of this setting today,” she said. “The last budget that I received included my associate judge.”
Eight district judges voted last year to keep all eight associate judge positions intact, according to records reviewed by the Falcon.
At a Board of District Judges meeting Wednesday, Aug. 19., judges present, including Surendran Pattel, Kali Morgan, Monica Rawlins, Maggie Jamarillo, Richard Bell, Steve Rogers, Mark Hanna and Oscar Telfair III, took up agenda item No. 4: whether to formally oppose the proposed cuts and submit a letter of support, signed by all judges, as an item for the county’s next Commissioners Court meeting. The motion passed, with every judge present voting in favor except Pattel, who abstained, but separately testified before Commissioners Court in favor of keeping the associate judges. Judge Edward Krenek was absent from the vote.
Problematic procedures
This isn’t the first time Fort Bend’s associate judges have had to fight for their jobs at Commissioners Court, but this year’s process caught the judges off guard in a way last year’s didn’t.
Last year, the county’s proposed budget also arrived without the three associate judge positions in it. In response, all eight district judges voted to keep them, and spent the following weeks lobbying for their case the traditional way: through multiple budget workshops with Pamela Gubbels, the county’s Director of Finance & Investments, and repeated public comment at Commissioners Court arguing against the cuts.
This year, the process looked different from the start. The associate judge positions were included in the budgets district judges received in July, giving no indication cuts were coming. When the draft agenda for Thursday’s Aug. 27 Commissioners Court meeting was first circulated, the item wasn’t on it. It wasn’t added until the Friday before the meeting, released around 3 p.m., and the judges say they found out it was on the agenda the same way the general public did.
‘Blood is going to be on y’all’s hands’
Family law attorneys who testified Thursday framed the cuts not as an administrative inconvenience but as a threat to public safety. Rocky Pilgrim, a Fort Bend family lawyer, told commissioners plainly: “You will cause actual harm, in many cases catastrophic harm. This is not something where it’s just an administrative hassle.” Pilgrim urged the court to think about what it could bring to residents rather than what it could take away, pointing out that Fort Bend still lacks basic services other counties have, including a domestic relations office and a supervising agency for parents ordered to have supervised visitation with their children. Those gaps, she said, go unaddressed even as commissioners revisit a staffing decision she said was already settled a year ago.
Pilgrim closed by invoking Mays v. Fifth Court of Appeals, arguing the judiciary is “one of the three equal branches” of government and “cannot be impeded in its function by legislative intransigence in funding.” Associate judges, she said, “are not just nice to have. They are essential to the function of our judiciary.”
Caitlin Thorpe, a board-certified family law attorney who has practiced in Fort Bend for more than a decade, was more direct still. Thorpe told commissioners she was born and raised in Fort Bend County and is a product of its schools. She told commissioners that family courts aren’t hearing contract disputes. They’re hearing family violence protective orders, allegations of sexual abuse, and making decisions that directly shape children’s lives.
Cutting three associate judges, she said, will lengthen an already serious backlog, pointing to Judge Monica Rawlins’ practice of hearing protective orders first: without a second judge to route overflow cases to, Thorpe warned, a backlogged day could mean another protective order goes unheard. “If we remove three judges who are there eight hours a day, if not longer, hearing matters, those cases are going to go longer and longer, and people will end up dead,” Thorpe said, adding that she has seen the consequences of court delays firsthand in her Harris County practice, where she said “people are dying” and “children are committing suicide” amid backlogs.
“That blood is going to be on y’all’s hands,” she told commissioners, “because we need to be able to see our judges in emergency situations.” Thorpe closed by telling the court it had opened the hearing by acknowledging Fort Bend’s growth comes with responsibility, and that the county needs to be responsible “for the lives that you’re impacting, not just your budget.”
Wong’s office attempts damage control
County Judge Daniel Wong’s office took to social media several times since Thursday to frame the cuts as part of what it calls a “Smarter Judicial Strategy.” In an Aug. 28 press release and accompanying graphics, Wong’s office said the move from eight to five funded associate judge positions will save county taxpayers nearly $500,000 annually while shifting toward a more sustainable long-term model.
Funding for the three eliminated positions will continue through Dec. 31, 2026, providing what the county calls a transition period. Because district judges’ base salaries are paid by the State of Texas, unlike associate judges, who are funded entirely by the county, Wong’s office argues the district courts represent a more fiscally sustainable path as the county grows.
“Fort Bend County is growing, and our judicial system has to grow with it,” Wong said in the release. “The question is not whether we provide the courts and judicial capacity our residents need … it is how we do that in the most effective and responsible way possible.”
Bobby Eberle, Wong’s communications director, said the county’s associate judge program helped Fort Bend manage court backlogs during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, aided by temporary federal American Rescue Plan Act funding. “Temporary solutions should not automatically become permanent expenses for local taxpayers when there is a better long-term path,” Eberle said.
A program that predates the pandemic, by decades
Judge Kali Morgan pushed back directly on that framing. Associate judges, she said, are not a “temporary solution” to pandemic-era backlog. They’re essential to how family courts operate, given the volume and nature of family law cases and the time it takes to hear them. Family courts across Texas, including in Fort Bend, have relied on associate judges for decades, she said.
The record backs her up. Fort Bend’s district courts didn’t have the legal authority to appoint associate judges at all until 1997, when the Legislature passed Senate Bill 415, sponsored by then-state Sen. J.E. “Buster” Brown. The bill added a new subchapter to the Texas Government Code authorizing Fort Bend’s district and statutory county court judges to appoint civil, juvenile and criminal law associate judges for the first time.
That means the associate judge program is nearly 30 years old in Fort Bend, not an ARPA-era stopgap, and it took root in the same period the county was also standing up new district courts to handle growth: the 387th in 1999 and the 400th in 2000.
Judge Christian Becerra, Fort Bend’s administrative district judge, said the record around the ARPA-funded expansion of associate judge positions during COVID is more complicated than the county’s messaging suggests. He said the additional positions created during the pandemic were originally expected to last only through the public health emergency, but continued afterward. Harris County, for instance, closed the positions opened by the funds, Fort Bend did not. Becerra, who plans to dispute the county’s reasoning directly with commissioners on Sept. 10, said 10 district judges, five Republicans and five Democrats, are united in asking the county to maintain the associate judge positions it already has, not to create new ones.
Becerra also disputed the county’s cost framing directly. Asked whether a new district court is cheaper for the county than an associate judge, he said no. He confirmed the roughly $500,000 figure Wong’s office has cited represents only the combined salaries of the three associate judges being cut, without factoring in any offsetting costs.
A friend to which taxpayers?
Becerra offered a more pointed account of the politics behind the vote. He described the push to bring the cuts back to a vote as being driven by Commissioner Andy Meyers shortly after Meyers returned from Austin, calling it “all politics” and “a power grab.” Becerra said he believed Meyers may have made commitments related to securing the 501st and 502nd District Courts in exchange for agreeing to reduce the number of associate judges.
The 501st and 502nd were created in 2025 and were filled with Associate Judges Richard Bell and Mark Hanna, appointed by Governor Abbott. Since Bell’s appointment he has gone before commissioners court twice to ask for an associate judge but was denied.
Becerra also pointed to what he described as a structural incentive behind the county’s push. He said the state uses a county’s caseload numbers, weighed against its number of elected district judges, to help decide whether that county qualifies for additional state-funded district courts. Because associate judges absorb caseload that would otherwise count against the district courts, he said, using them can make Fort Bend’s numbers look better than they’d otherwise be, which in turn can weaken the county’s case for requesting new courts from the state. “What they’re telling us is that they want the community to suffer in order for us to get new courts,” Becerra said, describing the logic he believes is driving the cuts.
If the three positions are cut as planned, he said, the remaining five associate judges would be reassigned by a vote of the district judges between the county’s general-jurisdiction and family courts. The Board of District Judges held an emergency meeting Friday where they unanimously voted to approach legal counsel on the issue. Meetings are expected to take place this week and lawyers have been contacted.
Caseloads and population, both climbing
Steve Fischer, recent State Bar of Texas Director and heads the 6000+ Texas Family Lawyers Facebook Group, told the Falcon that Fort Bend’s civil case filings rose from 5,901 in 2020 to 7,898 in 2025, a 34% increase, while the county’s population grew from 830,347 to 975,191 over the same five years. He said Fort Bend is home to roughly 320 family-law attorneys, about 3.2% of all family lawyers practicing across Texas’s 254 counties, in a county that makes up a much smaller share of the state’s overall population.
State data tells a similar story for family cases specifically. According to Texas Office of Court Administration county-summary reports, Fort Bend added 7,612 new family cases in fiscal year 2025, up from 6,899 in fiscal year 2020, a 10.3% increase that ranked as the fourth-largest numerical jump of any Texas county, and 11th-highest overall family case volume statewide.
Zooming out further, U.S. Census figures show Fort Bend’s population has grown nearly sevenfold since 1980, from 130,846 to an estimated 975,191 in 2025, while the county has added new district courts at a pace of roughly one per decade.
What’s next
The District Board of Judges is set to return to Commissioners Court on Sept. 10 to make its case for restoring full funding to all eight associate judge positions during upcoming budget deliberations. If Commissioners Wong, Meyers and Morales don’t reverse course, the judges say a lawsuit could follow.
Steve Fischer said the county has the sequence backward. Rather than cutting associate judges now on the promise of more state-funded district courts later, he said Fort Bend should secure the new courts first, then transfer pending associate-judge caseloads over for a seamless transition. Getting there won’t be quick, he cautioned: the Texas Legislature meets only every two years, meaning it could take several sessions to secure additional district courts even if lawmakers ultimately agree to create them, and he said governors have vetoed similar new-court requests from other counties in the past.
Fischer also pushed back on the idea that Fort Bend has more associate judges than it needs. Some Texas counties, including El Paso, assign two associate judges to a single district judge, he said, the opposite of an oversupply. And he warned the stakes extend beyond Fort Bend: if the cuts stand as a legitimate cost-saving move, he said, other fast-growing Texas counties could point to Fort Bend as precedent to cut their own associate judge positions.
Becerra said there is currently little communication between the commissioners and the court system about how the judiciary actually operates, and that commissioners have not taken the opportunity to meet with the judges or tour the courts. Judge Kali Morgan echoed the statement in her testimony to commissioners Court Thursday, “We get on average 200 new cases in each court filed every month. That’s a lot of work for one person. You’re going to be causing unreasonable delays. Families, children are going to be negatively affected. I would encourage you to do more research. Come down to the courthouse, see for yourself what we actually do before you make this type of decision.”
Becerra said he would also welcome direct communication between Commissioners Court and the judiciary, including commissioners coming to the courts for a tour and speaking with the administrative judges. He questioned why the cuts were being advanced before the courts had been given a clear explanation for the change.