As the courts prepare to hear the appeal for a pay increase by Chief Judge Judith Kaye, those who are defending the taxpayers might want to check out the controversy in Brooklyn over judges using a public park as a place to park their cars, a privilege the judges may defend with yet another lawsuit. The conflict is over a pedestrian square called Columbus Park in downtown Brooklyn that has been turned into a parking lot for the convenience of those who work in the Supreme Court building on 360 Adams.

In 1999, after the city agreed to build a new parking facility that would serve the courthouses at downtown Brooklyn, the chief administrative judge at the time, Michael Pesce, promised during a community meeting that judges would stop parking in Columbus Park when the new facility opened. No record of this promise exists, but the office manager of the Brooklyn Heights Association, Irene Jenner, who asked the question that prompted Judge Pesce’s promise, tells us she remembers it clearly. Judge Pesce’s successor, Abraham Gerges, also acknowledged to The New York Sun that the promise had been made.

Nearly 10 years later and three years after the parking facility opened, the cars remain. What a dismaying signal to the people of Brooklyn, whose community leaders are still hoping ultimately to ban parking entirely on Columbus Park. The immediate conflict is only over a planned pedestrian walkway that would run beside the rest of the lot, eliminating about 20 parking spaces. The Parks Department has ordered the judges to stop parking on the walkway, and the judges have threatened to sue.

Judge Gerges, as the new chief administrative judge and a defender of the parking lot, disputes just about every claim by city officials and civic leaders who seek to get the cars out of Columbus Park. “The strip of land in question has never, ever been used as parkland,” he told our Adam Rowe, adding later, “It’s been a parking lot for 50 years. Five-oh.” The Brooklyn Heights Association points out that the renovations in 1993 designed Columbus Park as a civic plaza reminiscent of that around the old Brooklyn City Hall. But as soon as the construction fences came down, the judges’ cars flooded in.

Not to mention, the Association adds, the former chief administrative judge’s promise to stop using the land as a parking lot, which has gone unfulfilled. While acknowledging the promise, Judge Gerges contends that security issues prevent him from honoring it. Judges need a safe, controlled, and nearby environment in which to park. “In 2007, 197 weapons and contraband were confiscated. Security plays a major, major role in this building,” Judge Gerges said.

When we brought up the claim that many judges in the building, seemingly worry-free, wander several blocks from the courthouse during lunch, Judge Gerges questioned our point. Because the judges don’t receive protection at lunch, does that mean we should take out the metal detectors? he asked, arguing that the lack of constant protection is hardly inconsistent with the need for basic security precautions.

Such concerns didn’t prevent Judge Gerges’s predecessor from promising that judges would park elsewhere. Judge Gerges invoked the attacks of September 11, 2001. We don’t doubt that Judge Gerges is sincere in his concern for the safety of the judges in his courthouse, but it strikes us that the far better strategy for protecting the judges is defeating Al Qaeda, not slyly appropriating parking spaces from the pedestrian spaces of Brooklyn.

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More broadly, there is a sense among many people we know, individuals who respect the purpose of our institutions and many of our individual jurists and their staffs, that our courts have become infected by a sense of arrogance and entitlement that doesn’t become a democracy. Even many who seek excellence and understand the need to pay top dollar for a quality bench are stunned that the judges have filed a lawsuit saying they are constitutionally entitled to raises that everyone else in the city is hurting for as well. People are flabbergasted to see a judge order that he and his colleagues each receive as much as $600,000 in back pay. The parking dispute is symptomatic of the same kind of arrogance. Everyone needs parking places in New York, and for judges to threaten a lawsuit over the city’s effort to return a pedestrian walkway to the citizens of Brooklyn, well, it’s an error of judgment.