Families in Thurston County divorce, custody and dependency cases have lost access to court-run settlement conferences, a change the court plans to make permanent.

Thurston County Family & Juvenile Court, based in Tumwater, cancelled all settlement conferences scheduled in or after February 2026, according to a notice on the court's website. The court cited increasing caseloads and budget reductions.

Settlement conferences bring both sides of a family law dispute before a judge to negotiate without going to trial.

To carry out the change, the court adopted emergency rules on Feb. 2 amending five local court rules covering alternative dispute resolution, pretrial conferences, trials, collaborative law and dependency and termination pretrial conferences.

The court expects to readopt the emergency rules every 90 days under state rule GR 7(f) until they become permanent in the next annual update of local court rules.

The cancellation comes as Thurston County Superior Court faces a sharp rise in workload. Filings jumped roughly 20% in the first half of 2026, reaching 7,790 cases compared with 6,480 during the same period in 2025, according to data from the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts cited in a court budget document. Resolutions rose about 22%, to 7,201 from 5,898.

In 2025, the court's domestic caseload alone included 5,005 non-trial proceedings and 1,473 active pending cases. Of those, 418 had been open longer than 18 months.

The court has identified a need for 10 additional full-time employees to sustain its existing workload. Instead, Juvenile Court's budget was cut by mandating six positions be held vacant, covering probation, detention, dependency and court assistant roles.

The court's budget pressure sits within a larger county shortfall. Thurston County is spreading a $22.3 million general fund deficit through 2029, with $5.5 million in cuts planned for 2027, as first reported by The Olympian. The county's 2026–2027 biennial budget already included $9.8 million in general fund cuts for 2026.

Superior Court Presiding Judge John Skinder declined to propose specific budget cuts at a Sept. 4 Board of County Commissioners briefing, arguing the courts are already critically underfunded.

"I am not going to come before you and say: 'We're going to stop doing criminal cases, we're going to stop doing civil cases, we're going to stop doing family law cases,'" Skinder said at the briefing, as reported by The Olympian.

Skinder warned that budget cuts would cause the court process to slow, that defendants would sit in county jails longer awaiting trial and that some delays could grow long enough for felony cases to be dismissed on constitutional grounds.

A separate Thurston County Clerk's Office budget document warned that further cuts of $181,795 would force the elimination of two positions at the Family Court front counter, keeping in-person services closed. That closure would also mean an estimated $116,100 in lost annual revenue from ex parte and bench copy services.

The state partially stepped in this year. The 2026 supplemental operating budget restored $600,000 of a $1.094 million reduction for state impacts to Thurston County Court, according to budget documents. The restoration did not increase funding for the public defense caseload mandate.

The Board of County Commissioners has scheduled public hearings on the midterm budget for Nov. 30, with final deliberations Dec. 2 and adoption set for Dec. 15. The board is also considering asking voters to raise property taxes in the November 2027 election.