Iron County extends paternity specialist post, rejects permanent hire

Iron County commissioners kept the county’s Friend of the Court paternity specialist temporary for another year, rejecting a permanent hire and preserving the role for now on existing performance refund funds. The decision came at the Iron County Board of Commissioners’ June 8 meeting, which was livestreamed by the county, and followed warnings that the office is already falling behind.

The staffing question went beyond one job slot. Michigan courts say Friend of the Court offices help administer divorce, paternity, custody and support cases in the circuit court family division, and the Michigan State Court Administrative Office’s Friend of the Court Bureau gathers statistics, reviews laws and court rules, and provides management assistance to local offices. State law requires a Friend of the Court office in each judicial circuit, with some counties allowed to maintain their own offices, making staffing a core court-operations issue as much as a county payroll decision.

Commissioners heard that Iron County’s office was struggling to keep current. Appointment backlogs have pushed family meeting wait times into mid-August, and a previous reliance on part-time staffing dropped successful service-of-process rates to 33 percent, a level that could jeopardize performance-based grant funding. Shaun Houle told the board the department was at a standstill unless something urgent surfaced, and said the current employee had already received extensive training that would be costly and difficult to replace.

The county also heard that training a replacement could take 6 to 18 months. That timeline, along with an annual cost estimated at about $12,000 plus roughly $10,000 in benefits for a full family plan, appeared to steer commissioners away from a permanent commitment to the general fund. Instead, they chose a one-year extension, a middle path that keeps the work moving without locking the county into a permanent payroll obligation.

The work itself touches the most basic family-court functions. State court materials define paternity establishment as the legal recognition of a man as a child’s father, a step that can affect child support, custody and parenting time. Michigan court reporting rules also require each Friend of the Court office to file an annual grievance record around Jan. 15 and a statistical report by May 1, and Access and Visitation Service Contracts are awarded using a tier system tied to new domestic relations filings involving custody, divorce, paternity and support matters.

In February, Houle reported that Friend of the Court had brought in $56,000 in payments and $14,000 in arrears, a sign of the office’s financial reach as well as its caseload pressure. Commissioners had other business before them at the same meeting, including Cooks Run proposals, underscoring how many operational choices are now landing on county government at once.