 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Roger Distruty. And of course, as you know, every month, we strive to bring a different department or program area for your interest and overview. And if you've ever had to serve on jury duty or pay a fine or forfeiture, you're probably familiar with the Clerk of Courts Department. And today we're very pleased to have the Clerk of Courts with us, Nan Todd. Welcome, Nan. Thank you, Adam. I'm glad to be here. It's good to have you here. Nan is one of our elected department heads for your term and she's been with the county. She told me on the way here, we carpooled over 35 years with Sheboygan County and that is just wonderful, wonderful. So Nan, please begin by telling a little bit about yourself and your background and how long you've been with the Clerk of Courts office. I was born in Sheboygan County, raised here, left after, shortly after high school, after a little bit of college and lived various other places in the country and finally migrated back here with my husband. We have, I have one son who's living in California and two grandkids, daughter-in-law that I love dearly. And I've been in the Clerk of Courts office for all of my 35 years. You have all 35 years, I'll be darned. I was a little taken aback when she shared that with me. I never believed she was worked with us 35 years. That's incredible. So when you started with the Clerk of Courts, what kind of work were you doing versus now you're the leader? I was in the accounting department. At that point in time, we had changed from a manual bookkeeping system to the first computer in the county and we had the people in the auditor's office saying, oh, everything's going great and we had the people in the Clerk of Courts office going, everything's going great. Nobody ever compared the numbers between the two departments. So I was hired as one of the two people to help audit the books and try to figure out where the discrepancies were between the two sets of books. Very good. And I've been there ever since. And now it's a four year term. I know previously it was a two year term. When were you first elected to be the Clerk of Courts? I was elected in 2000, took office on actually January 1st, 2001. We did the swearing in on the first of the year. And when did they change it from a two year term to a four year term? I think this is my second four year term. So I did like two, two year and now this is my second four years. Have you ever had any competition as Clerk of Courts? No, I've been very fortunate and have had no opposition. Nobody wants my job. Well, if people know about your background and how long you've been working for that department, clearly you know it inside and out. So very impressive. What are the primary responsibilities of your department? Our department is charged with keeping the records of the court. That's our primary function is to be the record keepers for the court system. We also do the jury management. We also collect all the fines and forfeitures and filing fees and do the scheduling for the courts. And how many courts are there? We have five circuit courts and we have 1.9 circuit court commissioners. One of our circuit court commissioners also serves as a law clerk occasionally. So for our viewers who have never experienced any issues with the court system or ever had to pay a fine or anything like that, just what are the five circuit courts? What's their role? What is the role of your Clerk of Courts office? Our county has a system where each judge serves six weeks of intake and that means that any criminal matter, traffic matter, small claims, juvenile, those matters go before that judge who's on intake. Civil and family matters are done on a blind draw so that every judge gets approximately the same number but not necessarily during their intake period. Then they're off of intake for the other judges six weeks and by the time they're back on intake, hopefully they've cleaned up all the cases that they got the last time. And for our county, it's working extremely well. Our caseload statistics are wonderful, our closing rate. So we likely have had viewers that, they may never have had to pay a fine or forfeiture at your office, but chances are they may have received a letter asking to serve as a juror. How does that process work? How does someone get contacted and how frequently could that occur? We every year send out about 6,000 questionnaires to residents of Sheboygan County and we get those names from the Department of Transportation. So anybody with a driver's license or a Wisconsin ID card will show up on that list. They pick the names at random and transmit them to our county and then we randomize them again and we select the people that we're gonna send a questionnaire out to and we send 3,500 questionnaires out each year. When we get all those answers back which they can do online or they can do them manually and mail them back to us, then we select the jury panels which consist of 240 people per month and then the people will get a summons if they're qualified to serve. Wow, wow. So population of about 115,000 Sheboygan County and of course that's all adults and children. Right. If you boil that down to adults with driver licenses, eventually you're likely. For ID cards. For ID cards, eventually you're gonna likely get a notice to possibly serve as a juror. Right. So they receive the notice, they get this in the mail, they may wonder, what is this? I've never received anything like this before. If they have questions or they're looking for information, what do they do? They can contact the number that's on there which is the jury clerk who is very knowledgeable and she would be able to help them with any questions they've got or there's information on the website also explaining jury duty. We send out a little pamphlet that explains how the court trial works. Excellent. Telling them what the opening statements are like and what they will hear during court and how their deliberations are handled by each court. Now people are so busy today and I imagine when some people receive this letter, they're thinking, oh boy, I don't have time for this or I have this coming up in my life or busy with the children. What is the average expectation? How much time does it take to be a juror? Well, you're on a panel for four weeks. So there are 13 panels a year. But during that time we send you a calendar at the beginning and the average is eight trials that you'll see on your calendar, maybe two a week. And on Sunday night you need to call in to our telephone bank and find out what trials are actually going for that week. The statistics have shown the last two years that only 14% of the trials that are scheduled actually end up going to a jury trial. So your commitment really is while you feel like you have to be available for four weeks, it really is only eight times and of those you'll be lucky if you have to report once. Right, right, so if you're hoping to be selected and experience that and provide that public service and the experience of sitting on a juror, actually the odds are likely you won't. That you won't, right. Because they get settled and interested. And once you've served as a juror then you're not eligible for four years. Okay, okay. So do you ever get folks to call and volunteer and say I'd like to serve? Unfortunately that's against the statutes in Wisconsin. You can't volunteer for jury duty. Right, right, right. But I imagine you have some people have experienced it and really enjoyed it. I've had some people that would really like to be on the jury and would enjoy it. And the questionnaires that we send out after each panel period are usually very positive. People will comment that gee I didn't want to do this but I'm glad I did. I found it fascinating. It was interesting. The judge was wonderful that, so we've had very, very positive comments from most of our jurors. I think excellent judges representing Sheboygan County. We do. Good people to work with. And when, this is my final question before I turn it over to Roger, but in that process, so you receive the letter, you know you have to be available during that period. You call in, you wait to see if there's gonna be a trial. When someone is brought into court, is it automatically gonna be a jury situation or in some cases will it just be with a judge? And if it's not automatic, can they request a jury? How does that process work? It depends on the type of case. Any criminal matter you are automatically constitutionally entitled to a jury. So when those matters first start out in court, the judge will give the person a preliminary hearing date. They will give them a plea date in which, you know, at which time they could change their plea to guilty or to no contest. And they will give them automatically a jury trial date. And the judges have what they call stack days, which are days that they've set aside. And that's when they've got jury trials, multiple ones scheduled. And then just see which ones actually finally go on those days. If you want a jury in a family matter, a civil matter or small claims or a traffic, you know, non-criminal type matter, then you can request one. It has to be within a certain number of days of your initial appearance before the court or when the case is filed. And there is a cost. It's $6 per juror. So if you want a panel of six, it's $36. If you want a panel of 12, it's $72. If you want a jury- So it's pretty reasonable. It is, it's extremely reasonable. If you want a jury in small claims, it's a little bit more expensive. It's $89 to request a jury. Wow. And obviously the costs are greater than that. Based on providing lunch for the jurors. We recently had a trial that lasted about two and a half weeks, and it was over $6,000. Very good, excellent overview. Roger. Good to have you with us, Nan. I know your caseload continues to increase each year, and we always are challenged with collecting the fines. Approximately how many cases do you have a month or a year? Last year, our caseload was slightly over 14,400 cases. And of those, criminal was probably about 2,000 cases altogether between felonies, misdemeanors, and criminal traffic. We had over 5,000 traffic matters, which are non-criminal matters that go through the courts. And fewer than that in ordinance violations. We did have over 3,000 small claims. We had well over 1,100 civil filings, and we had about 1,000 family cases. And if I may, those are all new cases. Those are all new cases filed with the courts. What was that total number again? 14,400. And what type of fees, fines, and forfeitures do you have and how are they collected? When a new case is filed in either civil, family, or small claims, there is a filing fee that's required at the time that the case is filed. So we collect the fees for that and divide it out at the end of the month between what the county gets, what the state gets. And for any other matters, it's after the person is adjudicated. When they're found guilty or convicted, then they're assessed court costs and fines. And then we do our best to collect those. We offer payment plans. The judges try to set up payment plans in court if they can. We send out reminder notices and if a person fails to pay in the allotted time, then we do driver's license suspensions. We do tax intercepts. We do commitments to the county jail. And we have a collection agency that we turn things over to as a last resort. Approximately how much money does your department collect and what happens to the money in which segments go where? Okay, last year we collected slightly over $3 million, which is the lowest amount that we've collected the last several years. It seems that the economy has hit us probably harder than most departments because our people are the least employable and probably the first to lose their jobs, our clients. Your clients. We paid to the state slightly over $2 million of that money and the county only retained 948,000. So the state's share, and back when I started working for the county, it used to be the county and state were pretty much 50-50. We each got half. And now the state has increased their fees continually and the county is left with a very short amount. Part of the money you keep obviously goes toward your budget, but how much more money is needed to cover your budget, your department's cost? We typically require about $1.5 million in tax levy because all of this 948,000 is not credited to my budget. It's collected also for the victim witness program. It's collected for the health and human services through the driver improvement surcharge. It's collected for the jail assessment, which is a separate fund. All of these things are collected by my office, but we're not credited with that toward our budget. And you have different services that are offered online. Could you explain some of that? Sure. The state has a website, which is www.wicourts.gov. And through that website, there are self-help areas for small claims and for family. There is actually a tutorial for the family that will walk you through the steps of filing a divorce in each county. It'll tell you, you know, ask questions and give you the papers that you need to file. It'll complete them for you. There are a lot of different guides to small claims, guides to family court. What happens when you go to criminal court? As I said, we can do the jury questionnaire online. So there are a lot of good resources through that website. Are there any new programs that are being considered by your office or anything else that we should know about that's coming up new? This year, we hope to implement e-filing, which will be a service offered again through the state where people can file small claims, civil and family cases online rather than coming into our office. They would have to set up their own account username, password, that sort of information, which is why most of the counties that have started this find they have some attorneys who adopt it, but not a lot of private individuals. So we hope to start that. We also want to implement more of our scanning program that we've started in order to maintain our court records, but not have to take up a lot more space in the building than what we already do. And there is a program that we want to develop further that is underway, has been open now for about a year and a half, and that's the Sheboygan County foreclosure mediation program, that I am administrator of. It's actually not a function of the whole office, but there are some of us, including the judges, who felt that with the number of foreclosures that are being filed in our county, we'd like to offer a mediation service to them. So we've just gotten that program started. We've had well over 100 people request mediation and most of them have been very successful. Thank you, Nian. I want to go back to the discussion of the budget. I'm sure when this program is aired, the governor's budget will have been proposed at the state level. And Nian, as you know, the governor's budget is a two-year budget. And for the county, it's an annual budget. And every year, Chairman Distrudi and I, and certainly all of the board members and department heads such as yourself work collaboratively to prepare a budget and try to hold the line on property taxes and continue to deliver excellent services. And of our 20 departments, we only have one right now that doesn't rely on property tax levy, and that's the Register of Deeds. And the reason is, is that the Register of Deeds is able to garner enough revenue from their clients or our customers who are asking for a copy of that deed or a copy of that record. We're able to garner enough revenue to cover our costs. In my humble opinion, if there was one other department that should be able to collect enough revenue, let me take that back, to keep enough revenue, to keep from having to utilize property taxes to subsidize its operations, it's the clerk of courts. And Nian and I, over the years, have talked about this. And in fact, we've submitted position papers to the governor and to our legislators. And the county board has weighed in time and time again supporting those position papers. Back to Nian's comment earlier, you may have heard she said she collected $3 million in revenue this year. Yet was able to keep less than a million of that because two million goes off to the state. And then of the dollars she can keep, some of that goes to support the sheriff's department and other areas associated with the clerk of courts. So I think our property tax levy right now is around $700, $800,000 to subsidize the operation of the clerk of courts office. And there is no reason we would have to utilize property taxes to subsidize their operations if the state would simply allow the clerk of courts to keep a little bit more of the revenue that you're the ones collecting. And we've worked together over the years on showing these charts and graphs and doing these studies. And you did the bulk of the lake work looking at the history. And I can recall you putting together an overview dating back to the 1970s where the state legislature would continue to add these fees to the work that your department does, fees that we need to collect. But time and time again, rather than you being able to keep any of that revenue, it's been forwarded onto the state. I know I'm catching you off guard a little bit because this wasn't one of the questions we were necessarily gonna touch on, but do you have a recollection of just how many fines and forfeitures that you're required to administer and collect yet instead of keeping that, we forward it onto the state? Trying to think back to the chart that we did, there probably were 60 or 70 different types of assessments that my office is required to collect. Of those, we get to keep about half of what's called court costs, which is $15, so we get 750. We get a tiny piece of some of the fines that the state issues. The majority of those go, as you know, into the common school fund, which is never touched and is billions and billions of dollars, and the interest from that fund is what funds the public libraries or helps to fund the public libraries. If we could keep even a tenth more than we do now, it would help tremendously. But as you know, we fought the battle with the state. Representative Lemahue had drafted legislation trying to get us to be able to retain a little bit more, not that we would be taking away from the libraries, we would just be putting a little bit less into that fund each year, and that went nowhere. Right, and so it's just a brief snapshot of one of the challenges that Nan and Chairman Distruty and I have, where we're required to provide services by the state, and that's fine, we've got a job to do, and we're gonna do it to the best of our ability. We are told what we can collect and can't retain, and in this instance, this particular department, what's ironic is they collect more than enough to cover their costs, but because those dollars have been allocated to other areas, including the library system, which again, good cause, dollars going to good purposes, but being diverted from the very people doing the work, and as a result, now the taxpayer, the property taxpayer, has to pick up that difference, and where it makes our job far more challenging, as I look at Chairman Distruty, is when we have a statutorily required cap in place now, where we can't raise property taxes, not that Chairman Distruty or I want to, we've reduced them for the last six years, but if we need to raise additional revenue to cover required services like this, at this point, we don't have even the ability to do that, so it's a challenging area to preside over, as Chairman Distruty's does, as our chief elected official, and then as a department head, who has to put together a budget, just like 19 other department heads, it's challenging. It is, it's very challenging. Sometimes you feel like you're not necessarily being treated fairly by the state, because you're required to do something, yet you're not given the tools or the revenue to complete the task. Exactly. I have a question, Dan. We talked about the five different judges. Would you explain a little bit about the court commissioner? I don't maybe think a lot of people are aware of what that office does and what the involvement in the court system is. The court commissioner is a separate department, and she actually handles the initial appearance for many of our case types. She does the bail hearings for anybody that's locked up in jail. She does those every day at 1.30 on Mondays and 11 o'clock every other day of the week. We do that by video conference. She does all of the traffic returns, which is the initial appearance and ordinance initial appearance. If a person pleads not guilty, then it's sent before a judge, but she ends up adjudicating the majority of those cases. The assistant court commissioner, who is our 9th, 10th court commissioner, hears all of the small claims cases, and for ones that are contested, she will mediate those cases also. The court commissioner also hears temporary restraining orders. She hears uncontested divorces. I think most of the juvenile matters go before her initially, before they end up going to the circuit courts if they're not adjudicated in front of her with a no-contest plea. So she does quite a bit of work. And another one that comes to mind is municipal court. We have a couple of them in the county, but that's not really involved with the county itself. Would you explain a little bit about that? I believe it's in Falls and... Sheboygan Falls has a municipal court. Plymouth has a municipal court. Elkhart Lake has a municipal court, and the city of Sheboygan and village of Kohler together have a municipal court. And the only thing that those courts hear are ordinance violations, which would be traffic or non-traffic if you have a shoplifting charge. And it's not criminal in nature. It's not high enough to warrant a criminal charge. Or if you have a speeding ticket, those sorts of things go before municipal court. The one thing that they do collect for the county is every fine also contains the $10 jail assessment. So they do collect that for the county. But the clerk of court's office gets no revenue from them. Thank you. Good questions. A lot going on with the court system, and it can be a pretty complex area particularly. And hopefully most people don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about the courts unless they get that letter to be a juror. And then it can be a very, I think satisfying and rewarding thing to participate in our judicial process. Well, excellent overview of the courts, five circuit courts, family court commissioner, the municipal courts. We're into, this is February, this may be shown in late February or March. But as you look at the year ahead, what do you see as some of the key challenges on the horizon? To initiate some more of the electronic programs that we have available through the state of Wisconsin. One is called in-court appearance processing, which rather than writing out minutes and then going and docketing them, they would actually be able to, the court secretary's in-court be able to do the electronic portion of the docketing in court. There are a number of counties who have already begun using this. It does require buy-in from the judges and it requires them to, at least in the beginning, proceed a little bit slower. So we're trying to set up a committee that we will start exploring using this for certain case types. It's available for small claims and criminal matters at this point in time. So we'd like to start implementing that. As I said, we'd like to start implementing e-filing and I'm hoping some of our local attorneys will go along with that because that would also allow us to be paperless because what they would file would come to us through the internet and would automatically set up the case in our system rather than a person having to enter all the paperwork. Always striving to gain efficiencies. Right, exactly. So if any of our viewers have any questions from this program or received a letter, as you said, there's a number on the letter, but generally what's a good way for folks to follow up with you or your staff and get more information? They can contact any of the numbers that are in the phone book. Our general number is 459-3068. One thing I wanted to mention is that we are a court of public record which means that the courts are open to anybody at any time unless it's a confidential matter that they're hearing which many juvenile matters, civil commitments are. But anybody is welcome to go sit in any courtroom that they want and observe anything that's going on in court. I would encourage people to do that if they're curious about the court system. See there are elected judges in action and of course we have a website as well that people can go to to get more of an overview. Nan prepares an annual report every year and we include that on the website. And if you have questions about any of our departments or suggestions for future programs, we're always open to that. And whether you contact Chairman Distruty or myself or go to the website and ask one of those departments directly, you're welcome to. Nan, thanks for joining us today. You're very welcome. Wonderful overview. Thank you for inviting me. And thank you for your public service. Thank you. And until next month, thank you for joining us. We're gonna switch things up on next month. Chairman Distruty, on my left, your right, we're gonna focus on his public service and his career here in Sheboygan County. He's about to finish up his first year as our County Board Chairman. He's hit the ground running. We've got a track record we're proud of and I'm looking forward to asking Roger some questions and for you to get a chance to get to know him better. And then he said, of course the following month he'd like to turn the table and do the same for me. So the next two programs we're gonna focus a little bit more on the role of the County Board Chair and the County Administrator. So until then, thanks for joining us.