The Clerk of the Court

On Tuesday the class took a trip downtown to the Hillsborough County Center. The class met on the 13th floor where the office of the clerk of the court is located. In a meeting room we got to listen to talks from four different people: Pat Frank, the Clerk of the Court; JoAnn Constantini, the Director of Official Records; Douglas Bakke, the Director of Family Law; and Dana Caranante, the Director of Juvenile Court Operations. I want to focus on our first speaker, which was Pat Frank.
Ms. Frank gave the class a boatload of information concerning what the county clerk’s office is all about. She started the talk by stating that the clerk’s office is the most important office that people know the least about. The county clerk’s office pays all of the county employees, which Ms. Frank said was about 6,500 individuals. They also keep records of all the county meetings, such as when the board meets. On top of that they keep records of the county commissioners and how they vote on all the issues.
Ms. Frank discussed briefly about how the drying up of the real estate market has affected the county clerk’s office. She said that her office is like a mirror of what is going on in the local economy.
Ms. Frank stated that the county clerk’s office is also responsible for sending out jury summons. She talked about how their system for such is changing, putting everybody in a 3-year pool instead of a 1-year pool. Although I did not fully understand the new system, I did understand that I will be summoned for jury less now.
In 2005 the county clerk’s office returned $5.3 million in returns from Hillsborough County back to the state. In ’06, they returned $7.9 million, and in ’07 it was $3.6 million. That brought the 3-year total to $16.8 million. On the flip-side, Pinellas County and Palm Beach County are deficit counties!
All in all a very informative trip filled with new facts and information about an extremely important body that I knew nothing about before Tuesday.