Meet Pat Frank. An innocent looking older lady who's been married for over fifty years, has three daughters and two grandchildren. What you might not suspect from this seemingly unassuming, nice woman is that she controls the records of your entire life from birth to death.
She is the Clerk of the Circuit Courts/Comptroller for Hillsborough County. This means this one elected official takes care of all the public records in the county and manages the $1.8 billion county budget. To me, this seems like a lot of power for one person. Somehow though, Pat Frank handles all of this pressure with grace.
The Clerk’s office files 42 different types of documents. These include birth and death records, marriage licenses, divorce records, mortgages, foreclosures, traffic citations, adoption papers, and evidence in court cases, to name a few. As Gil put it, the Clerk of the Circuit Courts is the “central nervous system” of the county. It reflects our society in the mirror of its records.
Frank’s job to keep all these departments running efficiently proves to be difficult. However, her colleagues seem to think she has done a marvelous job at streamlining their office. For example, the Clerk’s office can now turn around a jail inmate’s casework in a week instead of a month. This means less time in jail and less money spent by the county. In some ways, having the Clerk of Courts run your budget is helpful because they find ways to cut costs by making their own department more efficient.
During her time in office, Frank also introduced the Pro Se office to help expedite trials that don’t require a lawyer. People can bring their cases to a kiosk in the Clerk’s office and get advice on how to process their case. This saves the county money on public defenders and court fees for those who don’t have the means to hire a lawyer.
The Clerk’s office files 42 different types of documents. These include birth and death records, marriage licenses, divorce records, mortgages, foreclosures, traffic citations, adoption papers, and evidence in court cases, to name a few. As Gil put it, the Clerk of the Circuit Courts is the “central nervous system” of the county. It reflects our society in the mirror of its records.
Frank’s job to keep all these departments running efficiently proves to be difficult. However, her colleagues seem to think she has done a marvelous job at streamlining their office. For example, the Clerk’s office can now turn around a jail inmate’s casework in a week instead of a month. This means less time in jail and less money spent by the county. In some ways, having the Clerk of Courts run your budget is helpful because they find ways to cut costs by making their own department more efficient.
During her time in office, Frank also introduced the Pro Se office to help expedite trials that don’t require a lawyer. People can bring their cases to a kiosk in the Clerk’s office and get advice on how to process their case. This saves the county money on public defenders and court fees for those who don’t have the means to hire a lawyer.
My favorite change to the way the Hillsborough County Clerk of Circuit Courts works is the transfer of many of the public records to the web. You can just check out hillsclerk.com and look up many of the records that used to be only available downtown. This also saves the office employees precious time they would be spending locating a record for you.
I will not even attempt to describe and explain all the duties of the Clerk and her loyal group of employees. So I’ll just give you the numbers to quantify the amount of work that flows through this office of now only about 800 staffers (after a large cut that eliminated 117 positions). In 2008 this organization processed:
· 1.3 million document pages
· 439,00 transactions
· 1.3 million names
· 10,000 marriage licenses
· 2,800 marriages (in their “Chapel of Love”)
· $ 19.4 million in fees
These are staggering figures for just one place. The numbers only back up the fact that this office is the “central nervous system” of a society. As a journalist, I see it as a wealth of knowledge for any information you might need on an individual from birth to death.
So for all the work you do to make it possible. Thanks Pat Frank.
I will not even attempt to describe and explain all the duties of the Clerk and her loyal group of employees. So I’ll just give you the numbers to quantify the amount of work that flows through this office of now only about 800 staffers (after a large cut that eliminated 117 positions). In 2008 this organization processed:
· 1.3 million document pages
· 439,00 transactions
· 1.3 million names
· 10,000 marriage licenses
· 2,800 marriages (in their “Chapel of Love”)
· $ 19.4 million in fees
These are staggering figures for just one place. The numbers only back up the fact that this office is the “central nervous system” of a society. As a journalist, I see it as a wealth of knowledge for any information you might need on an individual from birth to death.
So for all the work you do to make it possible. Thanks Pat Frank.
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