Kalamazoo County Wants Two More Judges. It Hasn’t Answered for What’s Already Wrong Inside Family Court.

Michigan’s own data says Kalamazoo County’s courts are running at 119 percent of capacity, and the state’s fix has sat in committee since April. In the same window, the county found $1.5 million a year for a discretionary drug benefit and piloted a police drone. The court carrying the heaviest caseload still hasn’t accounted for a documented Brady and Giglio problem inside it.

What I Went Looking For

I read the WWMT story about Kalamazoo County’s judges the same week I was still following up, again, with the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Department about enforcement on a personal protection order I have had in place for the past year. Not because the county owed me anything unusual in that moment. Because that is what enforcement and follow-up on a PPO are supposed to look like when a system is working the way it says it works, and my experience over the last year has not consistently matched that description.

So when I saw a state report saying Kalamazoo County’s judges are drowning, my first instinct was cynicism. I expected to find a caseload padded with the kind of low-level enforcement that makes for good headlines and does nothing for public safety. I went looking for that story. I did not find it, at least not in the shape I expected. What I found instead was, in some ways, more useful and more damning. The caseload crisis is real. It is driven mostly by family law, not petty enforcement. The court asking Lansing for help the loudest is the exact division where an attorney with a documented integrity problem, one Clutch Justice has been tracking since June, has been sitting since January 2025. And the county government that says it cannot move fast enough on judges found $1.5 million and a unanimous vote for something else entirely.

The Number: 119 Percent

Kalamazoo County currently has 15 authorized judgeships: six on the 9th Circuit Court, six on the 8th District Court, three on Probate Court. Every one of those seats is filled. According to SCAO’s 2025 Judicial Resources Recommendations report, shared with county officials in early July 2026, the county needs a combined 17.81 judges to handle its actual workload. That is a shortfall of 2.81 judges and an average workload of 119 percent of what the state considers standard, using a weighted model built with the National Center for State Courts that accounts for how much time different case types actually require.

HB 5870, sponsored by Rep. Julie Rogers, D-Kalamazoo, would authorize one new circuit judgeship and one new district judgeship to close most of that gap, bringing the workload down to roughly 105 percent. Rogers has said plainly what is driving the bill.

“I’m hearing from the judges that their caseloads are high.”

The bill was introduced in April 2026 and referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it has sat without a recorded vote since. In July, the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to formally back the bill. Vice Chair John Taylor described the need directly:

“We do need another judge or two more judges.”

Passing state authorization is only the first step. The state would cover part of a new judge’s salary, but the county would be on the hook for benefits, support staff, and courtroom space, costs commissioners have flagged as significant even while supporting the bill. Neither WWMT’s reporting nor the rest of the public record as of this writing includes a specific estimate of what the two new seats would cost Kalamazoo taxpayers in total. For scale, a Senate Fiscal Agency analysis of a comparable circuit judgeship added to Kalamazoo County under a 2022 bill put the state’s share of a single circuit judgeship at $159,917 annually, covering salary, retirement contributions, and employer-paid taxes, without separately pricing the county’s side of the ledger. No comparable figure for HB 5870 has been made public.

Where the Caseload Actually Comes From

It would be a cleaner story if the caseload crisis were mostly about low-level enforcement crowding out serious cases. It is not. According to 2025 filing data for the 9th Circuit Court, family law cases, custody, divorce, support, and related matters, make up 56 percent of the court’s 5,883 total filings. That is more than criminal, civil, and every other category combined. The court most acutely short-staffed is the one handling breakups, custody disputes, and child support, not the one processing the kind of nuisance citations that make for an easier villain.

Part of that volume is structural, and it is documented, not speculative. Under federal Title IV-D of the Social Security Act and Michigan’s Friend of the Court Act, a child support case opens automatically whenever a custodial parent applies for or receives certain public assistance, including cash assistance through the state’s Family Independence Program. The Friend of the Court is then required to pursue support from the other parent, in part to offset the benefit the state already paid out, regardless of whether either parent asked for court involvement. That is a real, statutorily mandated driver of family court volume. It is not the only one, and SCAO’s report does not break filings down by underlying cause, so the full weight of this mechanism against other drivers, custody litigation, parenting time disputes, abuse and neglect matters, is not fully knowable from public data. What is knowable is that the caseload crisis in Kalamazoo County is a family court crisis first, and any conversation about fixing it that skips that fact is not describing the actual problem.

There is another gap in the public record worth naming. Neither SCAO’s caseload reports nor the Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s public reporting track or disclose the racial makeup of defendants moving through the system. The most recent prosecutorial annual report Clutch Justice could locate is from 2004. A county asking the state to authorize two more judges has not published a current accounting of who those judges would actually be seeing in front of them.

The Family Court Kalamazoo Wants to Give More Capacity

Christopher J. Elsworth spent nearly 20 years as a Barry County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney before moving to Kalamazoo County Family Court in January 2025, one month after a Michigan Supreme Court complaint filed in December 2024 named him. Clutch Justice documented in June 2026 that Elsworth denied the existence of communications related to a Barry County plea agreement on the court record in December 2023, despite multiple people with direct knowledge confirming those communications exist. That denial is preserved in Barry County court transcripts on file with Clutch Justice. Elsworth made the same denial to the Attorney Grievance Commission.

That is not the only documented pattern. In a domestic violence and sexual assault case brought to Barry County for review in July 2023, Elsworth declined to charge. No recorded interview of the person identified as the victim was conducted as part of that investigation, and she learned of the declination from law enforcement rather than from the prosecutor’s office. In a separate matter, a stalking complaint against a former Barry County Sheriff candidate was also declined for charges. That candidate went on to stalk a second victim in another county and was arrested there in October 2024. Clutch Justice’s full investigation, including a formal legal demand for withheld records served on a second attorney now working alongside Elsworth in Kalamazoo County, is available at the link in Related Coverage below.

One of the two judgeships SCAO recommends for Kalamazoo County would go to circuit court, the same court whose family division carries the county’s single largest share of cases and where Elsworth is currently posted. How a new judgeship gets assigned across a circuit’s divisions is an internal court decision, not something HB 5870 itself dictates. What is not an internal or ambiguous question is whether the county’s Family Court has publicly accounted for an attorney with this documented a record continuing to handle matters involving children and families. Clutch Justice raised the Brady and Giglio issues and the withheld plea communications directly with both Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeffrey Getting’s office and the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners in late June and early July 2026. As of Clutch Justice’s most recent outreach, neither had responded.

The Convergence Timeline

What Has Kalamazoo County Actually Done About This?

Strip away the caseload numbers for a moment and ask the plainer question. Kalamazoo County currently employs two attorneys with a documented, specific, and separately confirmed record: one who denied the existence of plea communications on a court record and to the Attorney Grievance Commission, and one who held that same evidence, knew a lead detective’s conduct was in question, ran no check on him, and said nothing. Both facts have been public since June 2026. Both attorneys were still listed on the county’s own staff pages as of this writing.

Here is the harder question the county has not had to answer yet. Elsworth and Norg did not arrive at the Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office through some elaborate scheme. They arrived through ordinary hiring, the same process every county uses to fill an open position. Whatever vetting exists for an attorney moving in from another Michigan county did not catch a documented false representation on a court record in one case, and did not catch an attorney sitting on evidence of a detective’s civil rights exposure in the other. Two confirmed instances is no longer a statement about two individuals. It is a demonstrated gap in whatever process is supposed to catch this before it becomes Kalamazoo’s problem. The county has not said what that process is, whether it exists in writing, or whether it has changed since Elsworth and Norg were hired. Until it does, the honest answer to what else is out there is that nobody, including the county, currently knows.

What Actually Gets Funded

The county’s Human Resources Director told the Board of Commissioners that Kalamazoo County spends more than $1.5 million a year covering GLP-1 medications like Wegovy and Ozempic for employees using them for weight loss, roughly 20 percent of all prescription drug costs and, by Vice Chair Taylor’s own accounting, close to 2 percent of the entire county operating budget for a single drug class. Taylor did not hedge his view of the spending:

“One of the craziest things that we do as a county is offer GLP-1s.”

On August 5, 2026, the Committee of the Whole voted 8-0 to keep the drugs covered but add a $200 monthly copay for weight-loss prescriptions starting with the 2027 plan year, described by several commissioners as a one-year stopgap rather than a resolution. Grand Rapids, Ingham, Kent, and Oakland counties cover GLP-1s for weight loss; Genesee and Ottawa do not. The county produced that $1.5 to $1.6 million figure, broken down to the percentage point, inside a single meeting. No comparable dollar total for HB 5870’s two seats, salaries, benefits, staff, and courtroom space combined, has been produced in seven weeks of public discussion.

The same month, the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety completed a six-day, no-cost “Drone as First Responder” pilot with Axon and Skydio, providing real-time aerial video to responding officers on certain calls. The public did not learn about it from KDPS. A resident spotted red and blue lights over downtown Kalamazoo and flagged a video to a local reporter. No funding decision has been made and the cost of a permanent program has not been disclosed. The comparison is not that a drone pilot is inherently wrong. It is that the county can approve, run, and complete an entirely new piece of police technology within days of anyone outside the department noticing, while a bill to fix a documented judicial capacity shortfall has waited in a legislative committee since April with no vote recorded.

The Counterargument, and Why It Doesn’t Resolve This

It would be unfair to pretend county officials are being unreasonable to worry about cost. Benefits, support staff, and courtroom construction are real expenses, and Board Chair Jen Strebs’s caution about the county’s exposure is a legitimate budget concern, not obstruction. The county does not control the pace of HB 5870 in Lansing. That delay sits with the House Judiciary Committee, not with Kalamazoo County, and the board’s unanimous resolution of support is more than a gesture.

What that counterargument explains is the funding delay. It does not explain the Elsworth question, because the Elsworth question is not a funding question. Reviewing why an attorney with a documented pattern of denying plea communications on the court record and declining serious charges continues to hold a Family Court position does not require legislative authorization from Lansing, state matching funds, or new courtroom construction. It requires the county prosecutor’s office to answer a question that has been sitting unanswered since June. One of these problems is genuinely stuck waiting on someone else. The other one is not, and treating them as the same kind of obstacle lets the second one hide behind the first.

There is also a more direct caseload argument sitting in this same record. Norg is currently prosecuting active Kalamazoo County felony cases while holding a plea agreement email he has never produced, and he did so without conducting any apparent review of Fuller’s civil rights exposure before relying on his investigative work. If undisclosed Brady or Giglio material surfaces in any of Norg’s active cases, defendants gain grounds for appeal, post-conviction relief, or retrial motions, each of which adds directly to the same court system SCAO says is already short 2.81 judges. Reviewing Norg’s active caseload for exactly this kind of exposure is a more direct, evidence-based place to start than treating the 119 percent figure as a problem with no obvious first place to look.

What I Know From the Other Side of a Request

I am not writing this from the outside. Over the past year, I have sought enforcement and follow-up on a personal protection order through the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Department, and the responsiveness has not consistently matched what a functioning system is supposed to provide.

What I do know is what it looks like when a system says it is stretched too thin to act, and what it looks like when that same system finds $1.5 million for something optional in the same year. Both are happening in Kalamazoo County right now. Residents are entitled to ask why one of those problems gets solved in a single board vote and the other has been sitting in a legislative committee since April.

I want to be direct about something bigger than this one bill. I do not think the fix for family court is simply more of it. The upEND Movement, and scholars like Dorothy Roberts, describe what most people call child welfare as a family policing system, a structure built to surveil, regulate, and punish poor families, disproportionately Black and Native families, rather than materially support them. Kalamazoo’s own numbers fit that description without much interpretation required. A family becomes a family court case the moment a parent is poor enough to need public assistance, not because a judge decided that family needed the court’s help. The court cannot tell the public who those families are. The prosecutor’s office assigned to family matters includes an attorney with a documented history of declining to protect people who came to the system for protection. None of that gets fixed by adding a judge to process more of it faster. I am not against HB 5870. Kalamazoo’s judges are genuinely drowning, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone waiting on a hearing date right now. But I am not going to pretend two more judgeships solves the actual problem, or that capacity is the same thing as care.

Kalamazoo County has the money and the votes to move fast when it wants to. Family Court, and the people waiting on a judge, deserve to find out what it looks like when the county decides to.

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