When Marin County court officials announced last week a plan to permanently shutter the only juvenile courtroom in the Bay Area’s most prosperous county, local attorneys and law enforcement officials were dumbstruck.

Less than a month earlier, they had learned that the court planned to have juvenile suspects sit inside a glass enclosure during court proceedings. Before that, the court had proposed that minors waive their right to appear in court at all, and instead participate in legal proceedings via videoconference from juvenile hall.

Court officials have presented the drastic proposals as essential to addressing serious budget and security problems in juvenile court, even though defense attorneys and other critics insist they would solve neither. The glass enclosure and the videoconferencing were abandoned in the wake of fierce opposition from the juvenile justice community, and the plan to eliminate the juvenile courtroom is also being met with objections.

At the center of the brouhaha is Kim Turner, executive officer for the Marin courts. In a press release announcing the court closure, Turner lashed out at defense attorneys, saying the court had “received no constructive suggestions from them or any other interested party” regarding the glass enclosure plan.

Turner says the courts need to save money, and argues that a rise in violent crime, and gang-related offenses in particular, combined with the semi-rural location of the juvenile justice complex made enhanced security necessary.

The controversy reflects in part the pressures that courts throughout California are facing in light of a $350 million cut in state funding (Marin is losing $1.25 million from its $18 million annual court budget.) It also appears to be related to Ms. Turner’s management and the culture of the county courts, which have been subject to fierce criticism in recent years for alleged cronyism and corruption.

And it also mirrors different perspectives on the socio-economic evolution of Marin County itself. To some, the natural beauty, great wealth and liberal, hippie-tinged culture for which Marin is famous are being eclipsed by all-too-familiar urban woes of crime and poverty, especially in the city of San Rafael. But others argue that such problems are greatly exaggerated.

While Turner contends that rising gang violence requires beefed-up security, a civil grand jury report on Marin gangs, released in May, found that gang crime statistics were “non-existent or spotty at best,” but that available data suggested that any increase in crime was “probably not significant.”

The report also said that Marin’s expensive housing, and its citizen’s tendency to “protect their lifestyle,” had kept the county “highly sheltered from gang activity” compared to the rest of the Bay Area. While the gang problem is increasing, researchers said, authorities and community groups have it “under control.”

“There’s a wannabe element in the gangs in the neighborhood, but overt gang activity is pretty unusual,” said Tom Wilson, executive director of the Canal Alliance, a San Rafael resource center for local families. “We’re not seeing a trend.”

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Critics of Turner’s plans to have minors appear in court on video screens or from behind glass partitions said the measures would have done more to criminalize minors than to rehabilitate them, and that they fly in the face of Marin’s strong community-based efforts to divert kids from the justice system.

“There is an active nonprofit community here in Marin,” said Carolyn Placente, program director at the Center for Judicial Excellence. “I think there are people who would have turned out had there been public meetings about this plan to put kids in a glass enclosure.”

That proposal came as a surprise to most of the juvenile justice community. Although the plan had been in the works for a year, sheriffs, public defenders, and district attorneys said they were not informed until late last month.