The 187 Percent Court: What Judge Galen’s Workload Numbers Leave Out

Every campaign needs a number. Galen’s is 187.

It shows up on her campaign graphics and in endorsement after endorsement: one of the busiest single-judge courts in Michigan, a judge carrying nearly two judges’ worth of work. It is a real number, from a real state report. What the campaign leaves out is everything that number is attached to.

What 187 Percent Means

Every year, the State Court Administrative Office estimates how many judges each Michigan trial court needs. It weights each type of case by the judge time it typically takes, adds up a court’s filings, and compares the total to the judges the court actually has. In its 2025 Judicial Resources Recommendations, SCAO put the 38th District Court’s need at 1.87 judges. The court has one. That gap is where 187 percent comes from.

The filings behind it are climbing. The report shows 14,517 cases in 2023 and 17,240 in 2024, a jump of 2,723 cases, or almost 19 percent, in a single year, in a city of about 34,000 people. SCAO’s recommendation was straightforward: add a judgeship, or consolidate the 38th with its neighbor, the 39th District Court in Roseville and Fraser.

How the Campaign Uses It

Galen’s campaign treats the workload as a credential. One of its graphics cites SCAO’s 2025 trial court performance measures for the 38th District, listing clearance rates of 103 percent for felonies, 101 percent for misdemeanors, 106 percent for civil infractions, 103 percent for general civil cases and 100 percent for summary proceedings, under the heading that the record speaks for itself. The same graphic invokes the 1.87-judge figure and describes the court as Michigan’s busiest single-judge district court.

The endorsers pick up the theme. Macomb Circuit Judge Teri Lynn Dennings writes that she has never heard Galen complain despite the workload. Macomb Circuit Judge Tracey Yokich and Oakland’s Judge Laura Polizzi each cite the court’s standing as one of the state’s busiest. Macomb Chief Judge James Biernat Jr. calls the docket substantial and says he is glad to assist. Chief Judge Mark Fratarcangeli of the 40th District describes the work as Herculean.

A clearance rate is cases disposed divided by cases filed. Above 100 percent means a court closed more cases than came in that year and its backlog shrank. On its face, that is a good number, and the campaign is entitled to cite it. It measures speed. It says nothing about whether the cases were decided correctly, whether the record was kept, or who did the deciding.

Who Carries the Load

No single judge clears 17,000 cases a year alone. A one-judge court does it with help, and in the 38th District the help comes from people tied closely to Galen.

The Magistrate

Michigan law lets district court magistrates handle a large share of a busy court’s volume: informal hearings on civil infractions, admissions and pleas on many traffic matters, arraignments, bond and warrants. In the 38th District, the part-time magistrate since 2022 is Mark Makoski. He is the named treasurer of Galen’s campaign committee, he represented her personally in the Cork Wine Pub dispute in 2021, and he shares a Hoover Road law office address with her going back to at least 2018. Clutch Justice has separately documented his sworn 2022 statement that he stopped living in his Warren house and the water records that contradict it. The court’s 106 percent clearance rate on civil infractions is the category where a magistrate’s hand is heaviest. How many of those dispositions were Makoski’s is not broken out in the public figures.

The Visiting Judge

Visiting judges fill the rest. From June 2021 to May 2026, the 38th District paid $108,860.91 to visiting judges, and $76,132.07 of it, about 70 percent, went to one man: retired Judge William Crouchman, across 192 sittings. His wife, Paula Mack-Crouchman, was paid $84,837.50 over the same period for administrative and grant work. Part of the visiting-judge spending ran through SCAO’s Virtual Backlog Response Docket, a federally funded backlog program.

When Clutch Justice lined Crouchman’s sittings up against Galen’s own reported leave, 88 of them fell on days she reported no absence. That is visiting-judge time used to add capacity, not to cover vacations, which is what a court at 187 percent needs. It also means part of the clearance rate the campaign is selling came from a second judge, paid by the court and in part by federal backlog money. That judge is now on Galen’s endorsement wall, writing that he has never met anyone who worked harder.

The Fix That Lapsed

The Legislature saw this coming. In January 2018, Public Act 6 amended the statute that defines Michigan’s district courts, MCL 600.8122, to let the 38th and 39th Districts combine. If the city councils of Roseville, Fraser and Eastpointe each passed a resolution approving it and filed it with the state court administrator, the 38th District would be abolished and the 39th would grow to four judges serving all three cities. The sitting 38th District judge would take the new fourth seat and finish her term. The statute set filing deadlines that ran out before 2020.

The consolidation did not occur. SCAO’s 2025 report recommends it again, seven years after the Legislature made it available. Under it, a single judge carrying 187 percent of a full load would have three colleagues down the road to share it with. The 39th District’s chief judge, Alyia Hakim, is among Galen’s endorsers; Galen contributed to both of Hakim’s campaigns, and she and Makoski gave to Hakim on the same day in 2020.

Galen took the bench in January 2021, after the window closed. The council decisions that let it close were made before her term. The choice to keep running a 187 percent court as a one-judge operation, staffed by a campaign treasurer and a favored visiting judge, has been made every year since.

Who the Arrangement Serves

A one-judge court has one budget line in one city. Eastpointe is the 38th District’s funding unit, and the court is a revenue center. The city’s 2022-23 proposed budget showed court fines and fees rising from $1,133,736 in 2020-21 to a projected $1,870,000 in 2022-23, and total district court revenue of $1,915,724 against $1,501,083 in court expenditures. Eastpointe’s mayor, Michael Klinefelt, is on Galen’s endorsement wall too, calling her the city’s hometown judge.

Consolidation would change that. Under the 2018 statute, the cities would have voluntarily accepted the expenses of a combined court, and the 38th District’s revenue and costs would have moved into a shared four-judge district. Nobody has to have planned it for the result to be the same: the arrangement that leaves Eastpointe with a court at 187 percent also leaves Eastpointe with a court that pays for itself and then some.

Galen has said publicly that she wants a second judge, and the courthouse design reportedly makes room for one. A second judgeship requires the Legislature. A consolidation the Legislature already authorized required three city councils. One of those routes was available years ago.

Questions That Should Be Answered

The workload numbers raise questions only the court and the city can answer. What share of the 38th District’s dispositions in 2024 and 2025 were handled by the magistrate rather than the judge? How many visiting-judge sittings were paid with federal backlog money, and how many by the city? Has the Eastpointe City Council taken up consolidation, or a resolution supporting a second judgeship, at any point since 2018? Clutch Justice is requesting the court’s disposition reports by judicial officer and the council’s records on consolidation, and will publish what comes back.

I don’t doubt the 38th District is busy. I doubt that busy is the whole story. A court at 187 percent, staffed by the judge’s campaign treasurer and a visiting judge on her endorsement wall, sitting in a city that clears a profit on it, with a consolidation option that has gone unused for seven years, is not just a story about one judge’s work ethic. It is a structure. Eastpointe voters get to decide on November 3 whether they like the way it is built.