 Welcome to Shebaugin County Government, working for you. I'm Dan Lemieux, the County Board Chairman, co-host of our monthly show, along with Adam Pien, our administrative coordinator. We tried to bring the services and departments of Shebaugin County to our viewers once a month, and this month we're going to feature our Clerk of Course department, and we have Nan Todd, the Clerk of Course, with us this month, and we're going to be discussing a little bit about the services that your department provides. And just for our viewers, if they've ever had to pay a traffic fine or serve on a jewelry, go to court themselves for various reasons, they've come in contact with your department. And I'm really excited about this show because I've never come in contact with your department for any of these reasons, and that's a lie, because I have served on a jewelry trial and on a jewelry, and I have actually paid some fines in my brief history in Shebaugin County. But these are some of the areas that we'll talk about during this half hour show of how the people come in contact with their department, but why don't we start, Nan, by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your involvement with the Clerk of Course department. Okay, well thank you very much for having me on the show this morning. I'm glad to be here and share some of the department history with you and a little about what our department does. It's a mystery to a lot of people because there aren't that many people who come in contact with our department. It seems like almost everyone at some point in time gets a traffic fine. However, most people just write the check out and mail it in, and they don't actually come in contact directly with us. I personally have been working in the Clerk of Course office for 23 years, and that was in June, celebrated my anniversary, and I was elected Clerk of Course for my first term last November, took office in January of this year. I began working for the county in what used to be the county auditors department, which is no longer in existence. It's been replaced by the finance department, which has grown tremendously, and the auditory also used to be responsible for the data processing department. And I started working on a project for the Clerk of Course office to reconcile the differences between their paper files and the accounting files as they were converting them to the very first computer for the county in 1976. And I started working for the county in 78 to work on that project. It was hired a year later by the Clerk of Course office and have been there ever since. You mentioned that you were elected, just recently elected to the office. It's one of five or six elected, county-wide elected positions in the county. How often does that come up for reelection? And I'm assuming that the duties of your position are pretty well put forth in state statutes. Could you just tell us a little bit about how often you're elected or reelected and some of the responsibilities of your position? Well, the Clerk of Course, like most of the other departments are elected every two years. I hope to be reelected every two years until I choose now to. The statutes 59.40 specifically lay out the responsibilities of the Clerk of Course office. And that is to administratively provide support and record keeping functions for the court system. And that entails, I mean, it's a very broad definition, but the rest of the statutes contain most of the details of what the office has to do. We have to collect all of the fines. We have to collect filing fees that are assessed. We handle, and by handle I mean we process all of the paperwork for all court actions, which are traffic citations, criminal traffic, felonies, misdemeanors, ordinances, small claims, any family actions, civil actions, all of those proceedings start and end in the Clerk of Course office. We also provide the support personnel for the courtrooms. As the elected Clerk of Course, it's your responsibility to make sure that all these things are done. Correct. Any functions or part of the mission of your department that are not covered under those state statutes? I mean, I was gonna ask you what the department did, but basically the department does what your statutory required to do. Exactly, exactly. All of the staff that I have have been deputized so that they are all able to sign documents and certify documents. That's the biggest responsibility that goes with actually being the Clerk. That and administering the budget and the resources for the department. Making sure that we have interpreters in court. Making sure that we have a jury when a jury trial has been demanded. Making sure that we have support personnel that cases get scheduled on a timely basis and get through court when they're supposed to get through court. There are timelines for every type of case. Probably the most stringent ones are in the juvenile area where there are some very strict timelines for all of the case types in the juvenile areas. And we have to make sure that all of those timelines are adhered to also. So a lot of your work and your staff, the work of your staff revolves around the courts. How many courts do we have in Chauvin County? We have five circuit courts with judges who are elected every six years on a rotating basis. We also have a court commissioner who holds court every day. And we have an assistant court commissioner who does the small claims hearings and any other hearings that are assigned to her by the judges or the court commissioner. So essentially we have either six or seven courts going every day. These five courts, the normal five courts are going every day. Right. They have something scheduled. Not necessarily a jury trial, but they're... But they do have things scheduled in court almost every day. Occasionally if you have a jury trial that doesn't go for some reason or another, then the judge won't have anything else that day. But usually if they know in advance that something's not gonna go, they'll fill in the time with something else or they'll use the time to write decisions. So the courts are busy all day every day. So the days that they have a jury trial we obviously have to panel a jury. And your office does that. What could you... Because some of us have been called to be on a jury, some more than others, some more than ones. Could you just go through the process a little bit so our viewers know when they get that letter, how they got that letter? Sure, I'd be happy to. It starts out with a tape that is received from the Department of Transportation of all of the residents of Sheboygan County who either hold a driver's license or a Wisconsin ID card that's obtained through the Motor Vehicle Department. So if you have either one of those things, your name could be on that list. They don't send us every person, they pull out approximately 7,000 people and send us a tape of that. From that tape, we pull at random 5,000 people and send out questionnaires to those people to qualify them for jury service. You need to be a U.S. citizen. You need to be a resident of Sheboygan County. We find a lot of people have either moved or they're away at school, so something will disqualify them. You also need by state statute to speak and understand English. That's a requirement at that statutory. So we go through 5,000 questionnaires that are returned to us and from those and the qualifications, we will select panels. There would be 13 jury panels each year because our system in Sheboygan County, you serve a four week panel. Excuse me. There are ways of being excused permanently also from jury duty if you have a doctor's excuse or if you are disqualified for any other reason. We are pretty lenient on excusing people from jury duty because we realize that it's a hardship for a lot of people, especially people who have any sort of infirmities. I have the authority from the jury supervising judge in this county to make most of those decisions. But of the 5,000 questionnaires, eventually we wind up with 13 panels of jurors. So when you get your letter in the mail, your questionnaire, that does not necessarily mean that you are going to be selected for one of those panels. It's simply to qualify you. Once we get everyone qualified, again, we go through the names at random and the computer will pull out people and start constructing the panels in four week increments. How do you know how the state, when you get that first list of 7,000 names, how they reduce it down to 7,000? Or they just randomly pick 7,000? It's randomly done by computer and what they do is they assign a number to every name and then they scramble the numbers and then they pick every, in increments, it's like every seventh number they will draw, every 12th number they will draw. They'll go through it until they have the requested number of names. Then they go back and put the names in. So it's totally scrambled. And that's basically the same way that our computer then will pull the panels from our qualified jurors. So you used to hear that if you voted, you automatically got put on the list and things like that. It used to be done many years ago from voter registration. It used to be done at one point in time from property tax rolls. Then it was decided that that was discriminatory to use the property tax because only the people that could afford to own property were being selected for jury duty. And most of the people, unfortunately, who wind up in court aren't necessarily property owners. So you weren't getting a jury of your peers. So right now it's totally random. Right. And getting back to the court system, obviously the only trials that need the juries are with a jury trial. Who is authorized to have a jury trial? If I'm going to court for some reason, how do I get a jury trial? Anybody can request a jury trial. Depending upon what type of a case it is, you are entitled to a jury free of charge if you are charged with a crime, which would be a felony, a misdemeanor, or a criminal traffic, something such as operating after revocation for the second time is a criminal traffic. It's considered a misdemeanor offense. Those types of crimes are entitled to a jury trial without any cost. If you are charged with a regular ordinance traffic, such as speeding, you were going 10 miles over on the interstate and somebody caught you, you are entitled to a jury trial, but you must pay a jury demand fee of $6 per juror. If you want a six person jury across you $36, if you want a 12 person, it costs you $72. If you have a small claims action, you are only entitled to a six person jury and there is an additional fee charged in small claims. How many jury trials approximately do we have in Shibuya County here? Last year we had almost 90 jury trials at a cost of about $80,000 to the county. This year so far, we've been running about the same. Now you mentioned that you admit that serving on a jury is time consuming and some people just don't have the time to do that, it could be a burden on some people. What, for the average person, if they're on a jury panel, they're on for four weeks, how much time, how many days, does that normally involve? That can vary from month to month in court to court. What we do is when we've divided our panels up, we will assign them by number to a particular phone number for calling in and then we'll use that panel, not just in one court, but in various courts throughout the month. So at the beginning of your term, you'll receive a calendar telling you what days there are jury trials scheduled. Generally there aren't jury trials scheduled every day. There can be as few as none in a week to maybe three in a week scheduled. You're given instructions to phone that phone number on Sunday night to find out basically what trials are still going for that week. If there are still trials going, you're told to call the night before the trial and again before eight o'clock in the morning because there's always a chance that it can settle before it actually goes to jury trial. Most jurors end up having to actually report to the courtroom maybe once or twice during their term. So it ends up, while it looks like four weeks is a large commitment, generally you don't end up being in court that often or that many times. If you have served, I believe it's four days at this point in time, then you are excused for the rest of the term. After four days? Right, if you've actually served four days. Unless you're in the middle of a jury trial. Right, then you finish that. You must stay until that trial is finished. Right, you finish that trial. Most jury trials are completed in a day or two days. We have very few that run longer than that. We have some long ones that are going to be coming up in September. However, our longest one was probably the Woodstock jury trial which was over the odors from the Mooth Woodstock Company and that jury trial lasted about six weeks. And that was a civil jury. And that seems to be some of the longest ones are civil juries, right? What kind of cases, Nan, are handled by your office and what is your case load through a normal year? How many cases are handled per year? Typically we have between 14,000 and 15,000 traffic citations. We have about 700 to 800 criminal traffic violations. Generally it's about 800 felonies and about, let's see what we had last year. We had about 4,000 misdemeanors handled through our office. We had about 900 family type actions that would be divorces, paternity actions, things of that nature. Interstate actions where someone was divorced in another state and now they're seeking assistance in collecting child support or enforcing another type of order, possibly a custody action. We have about 3,000 juvenile cases that go through court. We have about, let's see, 700 civil actions and about 3,500 small claims actions. So I'll total last year we had just under 30,000 cases that went through the court. And you have, excuse me, you have a staff of how many that? I have a staff of 32 who handle this, including myself. And that, when you first were working in that, in their court of course office, there was a staff of three or four? I think, no, there was a staff of about 21 at that point in time. We have added, because we've added two courts since then when I started there were only three circuit courts and there was no court commissioner. So we had branch, actually we had circuit court which was turned into branch one and we had branch two and branch three which were county courts. In 1978, shortly after I started, all of the courts in the state went to a circuit system. And so they renumbered the circuit court to branch one. In 1979, I believe it was, we added branch four and in 1991, 92, we added branch five. And somewhere in the mid-80s, we added the court commissioner. So we have essentially doubled the court system and added about 10 staff members. Recently, there's been more attention on the challenge of collecting fees, collecting fines. I was watching the news the other night and Milwaukee County was highlighted with the challenge they've had with collecting fees and fines. And I wanted to return to that a little bit. The first thought I had was you're probably not always dealing with the happiest customers if they're having to come in and pay a fine, a fee, or a forfeiture. What types of fines, fees, forfeitures do you have and how do we go about collecting those? Well, there are some fees that are collected up front. Those would be the jury fees that I spoke about earlier. Also, there is a cost associated with filing civil or family or small claims actions and those are paid at the initiation of the action. In fact, the clerk of court's office is ordered by statute not to accept filings unless they're accompanied by the appropriate fee. So we do not bill for any of those case types. They only, actually, we do bill one entity and that's the state of Wisconsin there. They made an exception for themselves. So we collect those fees up front at the initiation of the case. All of our other fines and fees are collected at the conclusion of the case. And you're right, most of our defendants are not happy. They don't wanna see us. They don't wanna pay us money. So we do have quite a job of collecting money. Typically, we collect almost $5 million each year in fines and forfeitures and filing fees for cases. A good share of that goes to the state. Last year, it was about 1.4 million went to the state. The rest of it is divided between the county, the city of Sheboygan and all of the other various municipalities that are within the county. Anyone who issues citations will get a piece of that. So I imagine it's good to have good people skills and a smile on your face when people come in because they may not be in a good mood to begin with. It helps. What about the difficulty of collecting fines and fees? What happens if people don't pay? What do you do? There are various recourses statutorily that we can pursue most typically in the case of traffic citations. If you had received your traffic citation, Dan, and chosen not to pay it, we would have suspended your driving privilege in the state of Wisconsin for two years. Probably why I paid it. Probably. I thought that's why we carpooled today. We would suspend your driver's license for up to two years or until the citation is paid. We would also docket the unpaid citation as a lien against you and it would show on your credit report and any time you tried to get a mortgage or refinance a property, you'd be required to pay those liens off. Another reason I paid it. Right. The other thing that we will do in the matter of criminal actions is we do have the authority to put people in jail for up to six months or until the fine is paid. Most of our judges order a specific number of days that you'll serve in jail. Unfortunately, there is a misconception out there that if I serve the jail time, I don't owe the fine anymore and that's not true. The jail time is a punishment for contempt of the court's order to pay the fine and once you are released from jail, you still owe the fine. We can put people in jail multiple times until that six month period has lapsed. But doing that cost the county as well. It does. To house that person in the. But occasionally, the sheriff's department also charges a fee for keeping the person there. So hopefully that will offset a lot of the costs to the county of putting them in. And a lot of our people do get the message after once or twice in jail and have realized that we're serious about collecting and they will pay us. So the attention on Milwaukee County, one of the things their clerk of courts mentioned was we just don't have the manpower to follow up with the number of fines and forfeitures that have been demanded. I know that you've got a very hard working staff and we've been doing well with collections, but there's always room for improvement. Are you considering any new initiatives to further improve our efforts and collections? We have just instituted a couple of programs in the office. One of them is we have gotten certified to use the tax refund intercept program, which is a matter of recording the debts with the IRS, actually the Department of Revenue of the State of Wisconsin. And we stand in line only behind child support arrears in intercepting tax refunds. So if we have people who have unpaid fines, we'll record them with the State of Wisconsin and hopefully we'll get the money through their tax refund. What happens to all the money? So you collect this, where's it go? It gets divided, as I said, between the state and the county and the various municipalities. We paid of a five million that we collected last year about 1.4 million over to the state. Approximately one million over to the county. It was 900 and some thousand. We collected about 300,000, I believe, for the city of Sheboygan. And let's see what we had for the other municipalities. Actually, it was closer to 500,000 for the city. I take that back and it was 1.2 million for the county. We collected for the other municipalities, such as the village of Kohler and the city of Falls and the town of Sheboygan, about 200,000. So we distribute it to all the other agencies that is required by statute. Very good, I know we're starting to run short on time, so I'll turn it back to the chairman. You mentioned earlier that in the early 90s, we added the fifth court. And that sort of snowballed a lot of things as far as locating offices in the courthouse. And we built our admin building behind the courthouse and moved most of the non-court-related offices out of the courthouse, where now the courthouse is pretty much courthouse. And just about everybody that's in there has some court-related function. And since that happened, your office has relocated. And could you tell us a little bit about that move and the new offices that you have? There's kind of an interesting story behind that. When I was researching a small bio for my predecessor, one thing that I uncovered was a note to the county board with an annual report from Agnes Malance in the late 70s, who said that one of her goals for her terms in office was to consolidate the clerk of court's office into one area. Unfortunately, that didn't happen for almost 20 years. Actually, it's over 20 years before it finally happened. We finally have the clerk of court's office consolidated into one area of the courthouse before that it was spread over three floors with little bits and pieces here and there. Because of having to locate the fifth branch in the second floor of the annex, it forced the move of the district attorney's office. It forced the move of some of the other various offices, but I think it gave us a chance to get into a beautiful new facility. We are still a little cramped for space, but I think part of that is because of the volume of records that are associated with the courts that have to be maintained. We have extensive storage space on the sixth floor of the building, what used to be the old jail. However, it would be nice if someday in the future, unfortunately, we're going to have to build a new courthouse. Oh no, it's not in a five-year capital plan, it's not in the next five-year capital plan. I realize that. What I'm looking forward to though is the point in time where we are going to see a sixth court, and unfortunately, we're at the point now where our case load is about 5.6 judges. So before too many years, I'm afraid we're going to have to face that, and I'm not sure where you're gonna put, I think the county board is going to have to move. We might have to raise up the courthouse and put another floor on or something like that. We may have to. Move the printing department out of the basement and stick somebody down there. But as Dan said, our facility was remodeled. We have a very nice, secure facility now thanks to the county board and all of their efforts. We don't have to worry about threats to the office anymore. We're not exposed the way we used to be. We had very little protection. We did have bailiffs in the building, but were there any sort of a threat in there have been in the past? We were really pretty much at the mercy of, and with the world changing the way it is, it's a nice comforting thought to know that when we're in our facility, we are secure. Thank you, Nan. I really appreciate the insight you've given us to your department and your office. Hopefully not our viewers. That's the only connection they'll have with your office in the future. So thank you for sharing with us this month. Next month for our viewers, we will be discussing our budget process. We have our finance director Tim Finch with us again. And we're in the middle of that process and we're looking to finish that by October. And we hope to get an update next month on just where we are with our different departments with that budget. So I thank our viewers for watching again. And we appreciate your input. Call our office. And if you have any questions as to our requests for different departments to feature, we'd be happy to hear your concerns. Thank you for watching.