 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name is Adam Payne. I'm the Sheboygan County Administrative Coordinator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring and today our guest is Julie Glancy, the Sheboygan County clerk. She's one of 23 department heads, and it's a pleasure to have Julie with us today. Thank you. Julie, why don't you start a little bit by telling us a little bit about your background and when you became County Clerk? I was first elected to County Clerk in November of 1994. So this is my 10th year as County Clerk. Before that, I was in the County Clerk's office for 10 years, and for nine of those I was the Deputy County Clerk, so I've got a lot of experience in this office. I also worked in the Clerk of Courts office after high school, and I also worked for the office on aging for a while, so I have kind of a wide variety of county government experience. And of all the department heads, you're certainly one of them that Chairman and I work with more frequently than some others. What are some of the key roles and responsibilities that your office has? Well, we're the Secretary for the County Board, which is why we work with you so closely as we do a lot of that. We also administer the election process for Sheboygan County. We are in charge of the telephone system for the county, the property and liability insurance. We also issue marriage licenses, things like that. And marriage licenses, speaking of that, a lot of people associate marriage licenses with the County Clerk's office. I see folks, young and old, going in there all the time. Absolutely. What's involved with getting a marriage license? Okay, you need to, assuming you're a resident of Sheboygan County, you would apply here, you need to bring some kind of identification, a driver's license, something like that, a certified birth certificate. And if your driver's license doesn't have your current address, we need something else with your current address, like a utility bill, something like that. If you've been married before, we need a copy of your divorce papers, your death certificate from your last marriage, and the fee is $75. You have to apply at least six days before your wedding, and not more than 30 days, because the license will expire in 30 days. And if anyone's watching this and frantically writing that down, if they need more information, who would they contact? They can call our office. Our number is 459-3003. And I know I'm catching you cold with this question, but generally about how many marriage licenses do you process a year? Somewhere between 700 and 30, 750. It's been going down the last couple years. We've seen a little bit of a decline, but... Very good. We've seen more marriages, though, where people are getting married at the courthouse by the Family Court Commissioner. That's really been on the rise lately, so that's kind of a different trend. And with all your roles and responsibilities, recently you announced a new service that the county clerk's office is providing. Why don't you talk about that a little bit? We are issuing passports. We're not actually issuing when we're accepting the application so we can send them to the Department of State to be issued. We started doing that in the beginning of February. Last fall, I discovered that the Department of State was going to be allowing county clerks to be issuing agents. Prior to that, it was only the clerk of court's office and the post office that was able to do it. So because we answered the general information number for the county, we've always gotten a lot of calls about where do I go for a passport, what do I need. So I felt it was a really good service to the people because they're already calling us for that information. And in addition, you need a certified birth certificate for a passport, and they can get those in our building. It takes more of a one-stop shop for people instead of them having to get their birth certificate here and then go somewhere else. And our clerk of court's office has not issued passports for, oh, I want to say at least 15, maybe 20 years. They used to do it, but I think it just got to be more than they could handle because of the great increase in number of court cases they have. What's the response been so far? Really, really well. I had no idea how many we would sell. I budgeted for 30, we sold 45 so far in the first month and a half. So we're doing far better than I anticipated that we would. So anyone who's looking to get a passport can go to either the postmaster or the post office or now the county clerk's office. The forms are available on the website for the U.S. Department of State. I think it's at travel.something, I don't know, but it's out there on the website. They can come in and pick up an application. I think even Walgreens where you can get your pictures taken also has application forms. You can fill them out at the counter or you can pick one up and take it home and fill it out or you can download one off the Internet and fill it out. But you do have to come in in person to apply for the passport. And when you come in, you need a driver's license or some sort of picture ID. You need a certified birth certificate if you were born in this country or naturalization papers if you were born somewhere else and are now a citizen of the United States. And you also need a picture. Yes, you need two identical pictures. If you go to, and I don't necessarily want to plug Walgreens, but they, all of their stores do do passport pictures. And if you just go there and tell them you need a passport picture, they know exactly what size and what you need to do and that kind of thing so they can provide those for you. Very good. What about children? Do they have any different requirements? Children passports are cheaper. A regular passport is $85 and for an adult they're good for 10 years. Children's passports are $70 and for a passport for a child that's considered anybody under 16 is a child. But those passports are only good for five years. Okay. But even children need to come in in person. Children obviously don't necessarily have identification, but their parents can identify them and sign for them as being the identifying person. And one thing I can certainly vouch for is you work with some great staff. If people come in will they receive assistance directly from you or one of your staff or how does that work? Either myself or my staff, anyone in my office can help them out with that. Very good. Well, speaking of passports, marriage licenses, let's go back to the initial item you raised and that was providing secretarial or administrative support to the county board as a whole. What does that all? Well, we do the agendas for the general county board meeting. We do the minutes for county board. We take care of filing all the documents, all the resolutions and ordinances and things like that. We of course do the minutes for that and keep what's called a journal. It's the proceedings of everything that's happened with the county board. I'm also the secretary for the finance committee of the county board. And all the committee minutes for all of the county board committees are filed in our office. So we do have information for anything to do with county board if somebody is interested in that. We also audit the county board supervisors' expense sheets, you know, just to make sure they're added correctly and things like that. We also maintain the website for the county board. And if you go to the county's website, you can look up committee meetings, agendas, when they're going to be posted. You know, when their meetings are coming up, you can find resolutions and ordinances. There is a link to the code book out there and our office keeps that information up to date. And that's really quite a challenge because committee meetings and things happen, you know, almost every day. So keeping the agendas and minutes and things like that posted is almost a full-time job for one of my staff. So if people want to know when a committee meeting is going to be, what's coming up, what's on the agenda, they can either contact your office directly or get on the website. And all meeting notices are posted out in the lobby of the administration building, too. So if you happen to be walking through there, you can take a look at any of the meetings coming up or posted. And you've talked about a lot of records. So if somebody wants a copy of something, what types of records could they receive from your office? We've kind of become the collection point of, you know, when they didn't know what to do with something, they gave it to the county clerk. We have coroner's dockets, so we get a lot of requests for people that want a copy of a coroner's record. We have school records from before they had the school districts and they had all the little one-house schools. We have the school census records for all those past years. We haven't had a lot of requests for that lately, but for a while it was a really popular thing to look for because when a certain age group of people started turning 65 and needed proof of birth, some of these people were not born in a hospital, they were born at home, and they didn't necessarily have a birth certificate. So they needed proof from these old school census records to show their age and things like that. We also have, I'm sure you don't remember, but there used to be a teacher's college where life with school was in Chicago Falls. When that was disbanded, we have their transcripts there. So if someone went to the teacher's college and is now going somewhere else and needs a transcript of their record, they would contact us that we can give them a transcript. Very good. Thanks, Julie. Sure. A major part of your job, Julie, is dealing with elections. In 2004, it's going to be a major year for elections with the presidential election and the April election. Can you talk about what offices are on the April ballot? The April is a nonpartisan election, so that means that all the nonpartisan offices for county, it's the county board supervisors, it's all the municipal offices, municipal county, not county, but town boards, village trustees. There are two mayor races, one in Sheboygan Falls and one in Plymouth. The Sheboygan mayor is not up this year, but Alderman are also up this year. In the cities, they have half their Alderman elected one year and half the next, so half of the Alderman are up for election this year. We also have an appellate court judge on the ballot this time. The two major elections that I think about are the county board and the Alderman in the city of Sheboygan. How many offices are open in each county board? We have seven county board supervisors that have competition, and we have one supervisor who chose not to run again, and there is one person running for that slot, and that person is George Martensi, and he was on the board before, so while he'll be a new supervisor, he's really more or less a returning supervisor. In the city of Sheboygan, out of their eight Aldermanic districts, seven of them have competition, and the only one that doesn't, I think, is District 7, so there's a lot of competition in the city. What about the fall ballot? Aside from the president, will there be anything on the fall ballot? Oh, yeah. All the county constitutional officers, including myself, will be on the fall ballot. Fall elections only happen in even years, so every time there's a fall election, our offices are on the ballot. The only one that's not as the sheriff two years ago, they were given a four-year term, so he's off the hook this year, he doesn't have to run, but the district attorney is on that ballot. Also, you have Senator Feingold will be on the ballot, Congressman Petri will be on the ballot, that's only a two-year term, so that position is always on the ballot. Senate 20, which is Mary Panzer, which is the southern half of the county, that will be on the ballot, and all of the assemblymen are on the ballot as well. Can you talk a little bit about what your office really does in regard to the election, what your responsibility might be? Sure. We register anybody who's a county officer. We register the county board candidates for office, all the county constitutional officers. The district attorney is considered a state office, so he would register with the state of Wisconsin. But other than that, we do the county officers. We put the ballots together, we organize all that. We do some of the ads for the elections, and we also program the election equipment. You know, when you go to vote in Sheboygan County, you put your ballot into a machine that counts it. Our office does the programming of those machines to make sure they count correctly. And with the election ads, what we've done for many years is we've combined with the municipalities, you know, we publish like the absentee ballot ad for all the county municipalities that saves everyone a lot of money because we can combine that, and we also publish everyone's facsimile ad, which will be published the day before the April election or the day before every election. But the one that comes out before April, if we didn't do it, every municipality would have to publish basically that same information on their own. So it's really a cost-saving to the municipalities to do it that way. You talked a little bit about a candidate registering to run for an office. Can you talk about how somebody would do that for a county office? Sure. For county board supervisor, of course, that's closed. But for the county candidates, such as myself, you can start circulating nomination papers the beginning of June. So as of June 1st, you could come in to run for office. The only criteria is that you're 18 years of age and you're a resident of Sheboygan County and you're a citizen of the United States. You would file what's called the Declaration of Candidacy form, which basically just says who you are and where you live and that you intend to run for that office. You file a campaign finance registration form, which tells whoever wants to look at it where your campaign finances come from that you're going to use this bank and this is, you know, if you have a committee, the names of your committee. And for most candidates, especially for the county board candidates, you can choose to file what's called an exemption. And when you file that, what you're saying is you're not going to spend more than $1,000 on your campaign and you're not going to receive or accept more than $100 in donations from anyone's source. If you do that, then you're exempt from filing the routine campaign finance reports. Otherwise, if you have a bigger campaign, like most of the assemblymen and senators run, you have to file periodic campaign finance reports where you say, okay, I spent X number of dollars on postage and this much on printing and I got $100 from this person. And if you file the exemption, you don't have to file those reports, but you do need to still keep the records. When you run for an office, you also have to circulate nomination papers. The county board supervisors only need, like, 50 signatures. The county elected officials, like myself, need between 500 and 1,000 signatures to get your name on the ballot. And you have from June 1st to about July 13th to get those signatures collected and filed in my office. And when they're filed, what we do is we look through them to make sure that they're complete and correct. Sometimes we have to cross out some names if the information isn't complete, but we make sure everybody has enough signatures to be on the ballot and make sure they're... And then once we have the names, when there's more than one person running, what we have to do is draw for ballot placement. I know a lot of people wonder how we determine whose name is first on the ballot, and it's drawn by a lot. It's just strictly the luck of the draw, so... Okay. The April election is coming up. If I'm not registered to vote, how do I do that if I just moved into the area? Okay. Pre-registration is really only required in the three cities in Sheboygan County and the town of Sheboygan. You can pre-register at any of the city clerk's offices or municipal clerk's offices, or you can register the day of the election. Wisconsin has a very open voting policy. You can come in the day of the election, register to vote, and go immediately to vote. All you need to provide is if your driver's license has your current address on it, that's really all you need to bring. Otherwise, if your driver's license doesn't have your current address, you would need something besides that picture ID, utility bill or something like that. And it takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes max to register to vote, so it's very, very simple to come in and vote. If you register ahead of time in, like, the city of Sheboygan, then your name will appear on the poll list, so when you walk into vote, you nearly have to state your name and they'll be able to find you on the list. So the advantage to pre-registering, especially with the presidential coming up, is that can be a very busy time at the polls, so if you're not pre-registered, it can take you a few extra minutes, but you certainly can do it the day of the election. And then finally, how many places to vote are there throughout the county and how do I find out which is my place? There are 49 polling locations in Sheboygan County, and you can call our office, you can call any of the municipal clerk's offices to find out where you vote. Generally speaking, if you live in a township or a village, it's the town hall or the village hall or the fire department. If you live in the city of Sheboygan, there are 16 different polling places in the city based on what word you live in, and either our office or the city clerk's office can tell you. And in the flyer that's going to be in the paper the day before the election, there is actually a map of the city of Sheboygan showing the polling places and where you'd have to go. Thank you. Sure. Elections, it's an exciting time. I know it's a real busy time for your office and your staff, and earlier Bill asked you a question about, well, how many signatures do you need to be able to run for office? And I thought you said 50 for it to be a county board supervisor. Over 500 to be an elected official such as yourself. Yes. What about a city elder person or a town? I think Alderman are like 20 or 25. There isn't a lot. The number of signatures you need is generally based on the population you serve. Okay. So for the county, because we're over 100,000, that's why we need between 500 and 1,000 signatures. The representatives only need 200 to 400, and the state senators need 400 to 800. So it depends on the size of the area that you represent. And again, the ballot is set for April 6th. The ballot is set and out the door for April 6th. A year and a half or two years from now, this will come up again for a number of these same offices. Very good. Now let's talk about your staff a little bit, because you alluded to them, and again, all the roles and responsibilities that you have. Why don't you take a minute to plug your staff and the fine work that they do? I actually have three staff members. Cherusay, who is my deputy county clerk. Her major responsibility is the county board. She's the one that keeps the website up to date and things like that. Dave Warwine is our accountant, and Dave is primarily in charge of the telephone system and things like that to make sure that our phone system keeps running. And he also gets the bills from Ameritech, which are like, you know, four inches thick, you know, and goes through them and makes sure that we're not being charged for calls we shouldn't be charged for and also allocates those costs back to the departments. And my newest member is Cheryl Savon. She's, in fact, yesterday was her one-year anniversary in our department, and she kind of takes care of the counter work and the marriage licenses and fills in wherever we need a spot. And to put this in perspective a little bit for our viewers, we have 1,300 employees in Sheboygan County, again, 23 departments, ranging from as many as 600 employees at the healthcare centers to four. Four in our county clerk's office. And when you get a sense of all the roles and responsibilities that Julie and her staff have, you really appreciate the work that they do do. You have to be a jack-of-all-trades in our office. You have to know a little bit about everything. You can't, you know, with just having so few people, you can't have one person that only knows how to deal with a marriage license because, you know, you may not be there when somebody walks through the door. And maintaining staff or maintaining the levels of programs and services that we're providing is getting more difficult. And I know through your tenure, you've seen the fiscal challenges that we've had in the past and that are coming in the future. And you, like every other department, has really had to step up and to address that fiscal challenge each and every year. Why don't you touch on that a little bit? Well, since I've been county clerk, I've reduced my office staff by 25%. And I've been fortunate enough to be able to do that by attrition. I reduced it by half a person when I took office and another half a person just at the beginning of this last year. And I think the computers for us make that possible because otherwise, you know, there's no way you could keep up and do that. The other thing that really made it possible for us is we sell D in our licenses in our office. And in the past, before the new automated system that went into effect a number of years ago, everybody was on paper licenses. And at that time, our office would disperse those licenses to all the agents within the county, to the Walmarts and the K-Marts and places like that. With the new automated system, we don't have to do that. So that was a big load that went off of our office and made it possible for us to reduce. One of the things that's coming up, though, is the HAVA legislation. And that's a federal legislation that's the Help America Vote Act. There's going to be a lot of changes in the election process because of that. One of the big ones is voter registration. And you were talking about that before. And with voter registration under HAVA, at the end of this year, the state is going to be required to have a statewide voter registration system. That system is going to change how we deal with voter registration in Sheboyton County because most of the smaller municipalities don't really have a voter registration system at all. So those voters are going to have to be registered, put within the system. And then when you register to vote, every voter is going to be required to provide us either with a driver's license number or the last four digits of their social security number. And that information will be kept confidential, but we need it in the system because you can imagine that there are probably a half a dozen Adam Paynes in the state of Wisconsin. So there's, without some identifying number, there would be no way to know if we had different Adam Paynes or if the one Adam Payne was voting in six different places. Half a dozen Adam Paynes. You could just feel people shudder when you said that. Think of the power. So with the election process and with some of this new legislation, I mean, are you seeing improvements? Do you think it's needed? It's time? Wisconsin compared to Florida, for example, I think we've done a pretty good job. I think Wisconsin is far better than Florida. I think we have a lot more freedoms in Wisconsin to vote. For example, we have an open primary come September. When you go in to vote, you can only vote in one political party in September, but you get to go in the voting booth and choose that party in the privacy of the voting booth. In North Carolina, for example, where my brother lives, when you register to vote, they ask you what party you are and it's on your voter registration and when you go to vote, that's the ballot you're given. So if you're registered as a Democrat or registered as a Republican, here's your ballot. Come November, of course, you can vote in secret and go whichever way you like, but our September primary is far more open than most states. Have we had the punch card system ever in Chicago? We have never had punch cards, fortunately. Ozaki County had punch cards. And you know, the draw of the punch card is that it's a very economical way to vote. It allows you to do it in the electronic format and the part we have what's called optical scan. And our ballots are, to me, I think the best kind of voting or the best form of voting, because you have the paper ballot, so even if the machine fell apart or blew up, you still would have that ballot that the voter voted that you could go back to and look at by hand. But there's a tremendous amount of waste in that system because for the April election, because you have county board supervisors, you have municipal officers, you have school districts on the ballot, we have 104 combinations of ballot styles in Sheboygan County for the April election. Well, when you do that, I have to have test ballots for all of those. You can't know if there's going to be 10 people voting or if there's going to be 100 people voting. So you always have to buy a few extra ballots to make sure you don't run out. So there's a lot of wasted in the ballots. And our ballots run about 14.5 cents per piece of paper. So it doesn't take many that you throw in the garbage for it to be expensive. And the punch cards, the draw of that was that they were generic. You only used as many as there were people voting. So they were a very inexpensive way to do electronic voting, but they had a lot of challenges. And as you were talking about the accuracy of our system, it made me flash back to when we were doing the recount for Senator Jim Baumgart and now Senator Joe Leipam. And my recollection was you received really a lot of positive feedback from how that was handled. And there were really very few voting cards that were a problem. Yeah, we had very few changes in our system. And the majority of those come from absentee ballots. When you vote absentee, you should really use a pencil to mark your ballot. And I know people are reluctant to do that. I think they're a little concerned that a pencil isn't permanent. But the problem, if there is a problem with our machines, the one drawback is that it doesn't read ballpoint ink very well. They read by light. So the pens we use in the voting booths are non-reflective ink. So the machine will see them. But a ballpoint ink mark, if you ever look at a piece of paper that's written in ballpoint, if you hold it a certain way, it kind of flashes. You can see the light hit it. And if it doesn't see the mark, it won't count it. And we found, and we found it out by accident when one of our municipal clerks was doing a public test. And she called me and she said, all my ballots are coming back blank. And she said, they're marked. I don't know what's wrong. My machine's got to be broken. And after we worked on it a little bit, we used a flare brand pen and made a beautiful black mark, but it was reflective ink and the machine couldn't see it. And I thought it was blank. So when the people marked their absentee ballots with an ink pen, the machine might see one mark on the ballot, but not another. And really that whole process was an opportunity for improvement because I know you work with a lot of great volunteers and people in the different municipalities that receive, you know, receive the public and process the votes. And I think everyone raised the level of awareness to consistency and approach. Oh, absolutely. You know, because the poll workers are all volunteers and they, you know, they do get some minor payment for being a poll worker, but it's a big job. And it's something that, you know, you do it, in this year you'll do it four times. The next year you'll do it twice and then you won't do it for, you know, almost a year. And, you know, as with anything, if you don't do it all the time, it's hard to remember all the little procedures and things like that. But, you know, it's always a challenge for them to make sure that they're making sure that they do everything correctly. And it can be, especially like in a presidential, when you have a rush of people coming at you, it's sometimes a little hard to remember all the procedures and it's easy when you're numbering the poll list to skip a number or whatever because they just get busy and that happens to everyone. Well, on behalf of Bill Gehring and myself, we certainly want to thank you for being our guest today. Well, thank you for having me. Our viewers, again, a lot of good information and if you have additional questions or want to follow up on anything that Julie Glancy shared, I certainly encourage you to contact Julie or her staff. And again, that number was... 459-3003. 459-3003. Again, that's Julie Glancy, one of our top department heads, one of 23 very good ones. Do I have to pay you now or is that later? And next month, during our next program, we're going to have another very good department head with us and that's Nan Todd, also an elected official overseeing the clerk of courts. So until then, thank you very much for joining us and we'll see you soon.