 Welcome to Sheboyton County Government. Working for you, my name is Adam Payne, County Administrator and Co-Chairman. Co-Chairman! See I've done it again. Co-host of this program with County Board Chairman Roger Distruty. And as you know every month we strive to bring a different program, service, department, raise awareness about the good work that county employees are doing. And we have some newer folks in county government. In fact a newer department head who recently ran very successfully for the Clerk of Courts Melody Largy. Welcome Melody. Thank you. If you've been at the courthouse to pay a fee or a fine, or you've been involved with the circuit courts or jury, you probably have some knowledge of the Clerk of Courts. But if not you're going to get some good information today. And Melody has brought along one of her good friends all the way back from high school. They both just graduated from high school a few years ago. And with her today is Jennifer Zimmerman. Welcome Jennifer. Thank you. Let me start with Melody. Melody just share a little bit about your background. I just shared you're from Sheboyton County. Where'd you grow up? I'm in Sheboyton Falls. I have been a resident of Sheboyton County my whole life. I married my husband Mike for 26 years. I have two adult daughters, Ashley and Carly. And you have been with the county for how long? I will be with the county 28 years next month. 28 years next month. I'll bet you folks can hardly believe that. And boy have things changed in the department over the years since then. When I started I was the family clerk way back when and the way we did the docketing was way different. No computers. We used these big old docket cards and everything was typed, manually typed. Technology has really changed. And you work for years as the chief deputy to Nantad or was that more recent? That was more recent. That was probably two and a half years ago. I started doing that. And some folks may recognize that name Nantad was with the clerk of courts for I think over 30 years. I believe it was 35 years and 36 years. Long time running clerk of courts and decided to retire and Melody decided to step up and run for office and did quite well. Thank you. And with Melody today as I said as Jennifer again back we just learned this off the air. High school classmates a couple years apart. And you've been with the county for now 26 years. And what's your role in the clerk of courts office? I am the chief deputy clerk of courts to Melody. Yeah. And from the area as well? I am from Schwoigen County. I've lived here all my life. I'm married to my husband Mark. I have adult grown daughter Erica and a son Jacob at home. And I started in the clerk of courts office as the filing clerk. And then I proceeded into the accounting department and now I am her chief deputy. So you both have two adult children out of the nest? Out of the nest? Still on payroll. My youngest is graduating from high school this year. So my wife and I are going to be empty nesters for the first time this fall. We have three children. So I'm right with you. In fact, I know I won't say our age Melody, but Melody and I are high school classmates. We both graduated the same year. So the clerk of courts it's an elected position every four years. And you were just elected when? I took the new term as of January 5 of this year. Okay. My first term. And now you're no longer the chief deputy as your classmate here is. Jennifer, you are the director. How's it been going so far? Real well. It's been going real well. Yeah. My sense. I've heard nothing but positives. You've got good people around you. A seasoned staff. How many staff do you have? 24. 24. And what are the roles and responsibilities of the clerk of courts? If someone has never heard of it before never stepped in the county courthouse. What does the clerk of courts do? We are the keeper of the court records. And we also are the are responsible for jury management. We provide court personnel to the courtrooms to all five courtrooms and the family court commissioners B10 courtroom to take minutes for the office. So a lot going on. Right. And we also collect all the fines, fees and filing fees. So you mentioned there's five circuit courts. And if you're not familiar with that, we have five courts that are run by state judges. And your staff helps support those judges. What kind of work did they do to help the judges be successful? Well, like I said earlier, we provide clerks to go to court and take the minutes in which they come back to the to the office. And we have staff that process the paperwork, do the jail papers, send out notices, enter the, you know, all the information in the computer that was set in court, put assess the fines. That's when the fines are actually assessed if any are assessed and then perfect. So if I'm not going to court, but I've gotten a speeding ticket, which I'm sure some of our viewers have. And I have to pay that I can come to the clerk of courts office and pay that there as well. Is that right? Correct. And how does that work? Is I have to wait in long lines to get assistance? What happens? Sometimes, I mean, it depends. Some days we can be very overwhelmed in the in the office. But usually it's not too big of a waiting period. We do accept credit cards now at the front window. We recently got a swipe machine. Makes a little easier for people. Right. Yeah, good. And obviously, we accept cash and checks and money orders. Do you prefer cash? Yes, we prefer cash. Good. Well, fortunately, I haven't been in there recently. I know my daughter was in there about a year ago paying a speeding ticket. And of course, people don't have to come to your office to pay a speeding ticket. They can send that in the mail, right? I presume that's what most people do. And you can also pay online. Very good. The other area that your office deals a lot with, and frankly, I find it rather amazing how smoothly it goes as you are responsible for administering and putting together all these jury notices and reaching out to the community and asking them to serve, which is a very important responsibility of people in the community. How does that work? How do you go about randomly selecting people to be on a jury? Correct. Well, we request 6000 names that come from the Department of Transportation. We and as you said, they are picked randomly. We get a it's put into our system electronically. And then from those names, we send out jury notices or jury questionnaires to the people, which they fill out, you know, the questions and they send it back to us. And we also now you can also do it online. So if you prefer to do it online and not send it in the mail, you can do that. And I don't recall that. When was that change made? I think just I'm not real quite sure. Maybe six months with them. Yeah, I believe so. Very good. Very good. So once an individual receives that letter, and I can recall the first time I received it, I thought, oh, this could be kind of interesting. I've never served on jury duty. And ultimately, I wasn't able to because being a county employee, the judge excused me. But they get that notice. And then what happens? Well, when we talked about the questionnaires of those, just because you got a questionnaire doesn't mean that you're actually going to be served serving on a jury. When we get those back and we put every all the information in the computer. Some people aren't eligible. So out of all those, we probably get like 3,500 people that actually qualify to serve as a juror. So is it you and your staff's responsibility kind of to go through the questionnaires and pare it down a little bit? And then we have a jury quick that takes care of all that. And then they come in and I can recall this a little bit, although it's been a while they come in and the judges there and the attorneys are there, I think, from both sides. And then they go about selecting jurors and they may ask questions of them what have you. So even if you get that notice to your point, you may ultimately never serve on the jury because either you're not selected. For some reason, you're weeded out or the case is settled. And there's no need for a jury. I would say that of all the cases that are scheduled, we have different we have pools of jurors. There's like 240 people's names that are in a jury pool. And then it's split up between four different panels of a panel of like 60 jurors. So that are and then they have maybe a list of eight scheduled court dates on your calendar when you get your court calendar. So on a Sunday evening is when it's there's a number on there that you need to call. And then the automated system will let you know when you need to report if you need to report. Or, you know, if they're if you know the trials are off or whatever. But I would say that of all the trial schedule, probably 14% of them actually go really that little right 14% actually Wow. So if you're looking forward to serving on jury duty, the odds are against you, which we do have people that really want to be on jury duty, right? So they want to know how they can get on jury duty. But obviously, you know, we, we aren't allowed to just put people on the jury panel. You have to go through the through the ropes. And it's really your civil duty to respond when you're selected. And employers need to be good about accommodating their, their staff to be sure that they're able to serve. Correct. Yeah, very good. Well, let me turn to Jennifer for a minute. We've, we've let you just stay out of the limelight for a second. Let's bring everything right back. You are the chief deputy. What's the responsibility of being the chief deputy to assist melody with anything that she needs. That's why she's so successful. That's right. I'm going to learn from her. I see. Learn from her. But then again, you've been with the department, as you said, for 26 years, right? Yes. So what have been some of your roles and responsibilities? I did start out as a filing clerk at our front window. And then I moved to the accounting department. That was my main responsibility over what? 12 years or so. Okay. And then for the last two years, I've been helping out with chapter 51 smiling because we had another clerk go to court. So I have spent a lot of time doing that, which took away from the procedures that I did like collection and department of revenue for the unpaid fines that people didn't pay. And chapter 51, you mentioned that what what's chapter 51? Mental commitments. Right. And there's a lot of time sometimes involved in that scheduling them with their scheduled out of the county or in the county. And then you also mentioned collecting fines. And I'll ask a couple of questions there and and turn it over to Roger. Well, let me just ask one because I don't want to steal Roger's thunder. Collecting fines is obviously one of the key responsibilities that your department has annually. You know, what kind of what are we talking about here? In fact, Melody, I think I forgot to ask you what's the department's annual budget? $2 million. So you've got a $2 million budget and you've got I think you said 24 staff. Correct. A lot going on that you're overseeing. And within these roles and responsibilities, one of them is collecting the fines, which we talked about earlier. Any feel for annually? How much you're collecting and fines? Roughly $2.9 million. $2.9 million. Okay. Well, with that set up, I'm going to turn it over to the chairman, Roger. Thank you. And great to have you both here and a lot of good things are happening in the court system, but it is a busy court system. And approximately how many cases would be heard or how many a year? You have any idea on that? Last year, we had about 13,700 cases filed in our department. 6,000 of those were traffic and ordinance cases. Roughly 2,300 of that was criminal, criminal traffic and felony cases. 3,000 of that was small claims. And then the rest were family, criminal, I mean, excuse me, civil and juvenile and probate cases. And we talked a little bit about the fines that people have to pay and how many dollars get collected and how much of that do we keep? And does most of it really go to the state or they just make us be the bad guys and collect the money? The majority of the money goes to the state. Of that 2.9 million dollars I spoke of, we get to keep roughly 860,000 of that. And you said earlier that your total budget is 2 million. Correct. And you're collecting 2.9 million and you get to keep 860,000 of it. Correct. So that tells me, Mr. Chairman, that county taxpayers must be subsidizing the operations of this mandated program. That's right. But the state will tell you that the judges are state employees, they pay for that. And the DA, I believe all of those people in the DA's office are state employees also. And that's what they'll be arguing, that they're supporting quite a bit of that also. But not all of it. And we have to pick up quite a bit of the difference like that, too. And in some people, I know that the forfeitures and fines can be a problem. Are there ways that we can get money from, for instance, some of the prisoners are assessed, the jail assessment fee. And that is one way that we can collect something to help us pay for the jail and that. But that's one of the few ways that we are able to get the money back. Isn't that correct? Correct. And again, I appreciate all the good work you do. And there's a lot of things happening in the court system. And thank you both for doing your job very well. Thank you. I noticed she smiled the largest when you said the state gets to keep most of the money, don't they? And I wasn't sure if that was a smile of happiness or, yeah, that's how it works. It's very frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. Melody and her predecessor, Nantad, put together a really nice paper with the assistance of our finance director years ago, as you know, Roger, that outlined that here we have this hundred percent mandated program. I mean, this is a one-on-one lesson in government. The state essentially tells county government what they should do. And we have mandatory and discretionary programs. The court is really a hundred percent mandated. We have to provide these services, but the state doesn't provide the revenue to help pay for the operations. We do have the ability to collect these fines and forfeitures. As you heard earlier, what 2.9 million a year, yet we're not able to keep sufficient revenue to cover our costs. So the property taxpayer, you and I, pick up the difference. Chairman Distrudi is right on. The state obviously picks up other responsibilities as well, but the way it's supposed to work is if one level of government mandates to another level of government, you're supposed to do something. Generally, the dollar should follow through on how to do that, or it's an on mandate, it's an underfunded program. But in any regards, as Melody said, it can be a little frustrating, because when we have one-size-fits-all state-imposed property tax caps in place, it's difficult to give employees cost-living increases or health insurance increases or whatever it may be, because we're, it's challenging, it's challenging. But I digress. Let's get back to your department and what's and the good things that are going on. Back to the collections. Now I know you and your staff work really hard to collect these funds, but in some cases people just don't have the means to pay, right? Absolutely. And for years, I mean that builds up on the books. What's, what's the general trend there? Do you find that most people are able to pay, but it's, you know, what's, give us a little flavor for that challenge? Well, we work with people. We really try to. But, you know, with the economy over the last several years, you know, it hasn't been good for, you know, some of the defendants and, and finding jobs and keeping jobs. So, but we allow them to go on payment plans. We set up payment plans and we do try to, you know, collect the money. We send out reminder notices to people. We suspend driver's licenses. We suspend their DNR, DNR licenses. That would motivate me to pay so they can't hunt or fish until they pay. Yeah, I would imagine that would be effective. We also do tax intercepts and we send out commitments for criminal cases and if nothing else works, then we, we will use a collection agency as a final. As a final step. And again, and then there's some folks who just never pay. Correct. And those dollars are just never fulfilled and people aren't held accountable essentially for that, right? But our staff really tries hard to collect the money. Yeah, yeah. And you've got, let's talk about your staff for a little while. It seems to me you've just got some great staff. We do. Really experienced, hardworking. Very. I mean, we are very fortunate. Sheboygan County is very fortunate to have such good workers because they really work hard. There's a lot of paperwork that goes through our department and they're very knowledgeable about their jobs and they are, I don't know, I just can't say anything bad about them at all. They're just, it's great. And they're probably folks who don't get a lot of pats on the back because they're in positions where when you're collecting, you know, penalties, fines, forfeitures, you don't have necessarily happy customers at the front desk, right? Absolutely. Yeah, kind of like child support. I've always tipped my hat to those staff as well because that's tough. It's tough, yeah. Well, I'm glad you're surrounded by such a good team and I think it shows, as Roger said, Clerk of Court's office, I think, provides excellent service here. Five circuit court judges were lying on it. I've never heard a complaint from our judges about your good staff and it just seems like you continue to make good things happen, so thank you both for that. Thank you. As you mentioned earlier, technology's evolving so much. I mean, it's just really taken off. What services are available online? What you mentioned, you can complete the jury applications online. The jury questionnaires online. You can pay your fines. You can pay directly online? Correct. Okay. Through the Shboygan County website, there's a tab on there where you can pay the fines directly or you can go directly to the Clerk of Court's department and there are several things on there. There's like abbreviation to small claims. There's divorce information on there, information about traffic. There's links on there to link you to the WCCA site where you also can go on there and pay your fees online or there's forms if you would need a small claims form or a motion. There's several I do or how do I do this? Nice. Opinions on there. And Mel is going to update the Shboygan County site because the WCCA site now has Visa and MasterCard in which it was just one. Okay. So she's in the process of that. Please. One thing that I know we've we've had some questions about and we've upgraded the technology part of it as you. Walk in the courthouse. It's such a big courthouse. There's five courts. People walk in where to go. Now we have a kiosk. Correct. That's really great when you walk in the courthouse in the front door. Maybe either of you can explain what buttons you can push and I believe there's quite a few choices that'll get you to the right place, isn't it? Yeah. There's I think you can either enter your name or case number and it just brings you right to the calendar. It'll point you to the judge that the court is held in. I think that's a choice. You know which judge it is. You don't know where it is or you know the case number and then you can help direct yourself to where you need to go, isn't it? So that's another point of technology that's helped quite a bit. It's an area we're trying to continue to improve based on some feedback you and I received within last year. In fact, Roger and I were in the front door and there was young lady looking to find some room or department and was struggling and Roger I think made the comment boy a key ask or something like that would be beneficial as well as as we've discussed that department heads as you know Melody getting some better signage in the building. It's such a beautiful building but if you've never been in it it can be a little intimidating and where do I go so... And we also are very fortunate to have that desk there where we have volunteers sitting there. Yes. You know it's good to see a lot of them are retirees from the county that work there. So they got a pretty good feel for things. Yeah that's a great point. So they direct people and that's really nice. Yeah it sure is. Any new programs or new initiatives that you're considering under your new leadership of the Clerk of Court's office? Well we would like to start e-filing soon and eventually we would like to go paperless. It's something we're working on. So when you say e-filing for example what does that mean? We'd like to... You can file documents by the computer. Okay so everything on the computer rather than having to come in at all or ever have to wait in the line. Correct. Very good. We have work towards this already. We've been scanning documents already for a year and a half. So I mean we're just waiting for a few more components that we need to to eventually go paperless. So the scanning the documents show the history of past occurrences or your scanning in forms? We're scanning in all documents that we would that we also would dock it into the actual court record. Gotcha. And then of course the judges need to support this going paperless and I've been involved in some of those discussions with the judges and I know that's a that's a big step. I think there you know they're coming around and I think it's really great because if you know you can just go on a case now and you can find the paperwork right on the computer. It's you can pull it up and it brings it up and you don't need to actually pull a file or if the file's not where it is you know if it's up by the judge or JA or wherever. Right. I mean you have it right at your fingertips. Right. So it's Well I know it can be done because chairman Distruty and the county board when paperless what's it been three four years now and there were some members of the board like our friend Dick Bemis who you know is a more senior board member and a few others who I don't think we're real enthusiastic and now we here consistently everyone really appreciates having all that information available at their fingertips and they don't have to cure around big binders or cut down a forest every meeting to distribute information so it's worked out pretty well. It's amazing. Yeah well that's a great initiative. I'm glad to hear that. Well thank you both for taking time to join us today. Melody it's I'm so pleased to have you as our new clerk of courts. I was pulling for you when you ran. I know you were running against one of your co-workers so I know we had two good people running but one of the things I appreciated about your campaign was you ran as an independent and in my opinion county government is largely independent. We don't spend the time that the state and federal government does with partisan issues. It's very non-partisan and I've always felt all of our elected department heads whether you're the clerk of courts or county clerk or treasurer why do these have to be partisan positions? You know frankly some would argue why are they even elected? They could be appointed department heads like the other but I admired you for running as an independent because sometimes folks are always pulling the D or always pulling the R and you did very well so it's good to have you with us and thank you for your nice overview today. Thank you very much. And Jennifer thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's great to see another face from the clerk of courts and thank you for your 26 years of service to Sheboygan County. Thank you. Pretty impressive pretty impressive and thank you for joining us if you have any questions about the clerk of courts office you want to talk to Melody or Jennifer and and follow up on something they shared or you have a suggestion for improvement don't hesitate to reach out to us. We do have a pretty nice county website where there's information there and how you can get a hold of these folks and if you're never sure you can always contact our county clerk's office or my office chairman Distruty's office and we'll get you the right telephone number and also if you have any suggestions for programs or services you'd like focused on in the future again don't hesitate to call us or your county board supervisor. Next month we're going to have our HR director here Jean Gallimore she's going to talk about this immense compensation study that the county board just passed and some really nice changes for county government took a lot of hard work and I know she's very proud of what all played out there so until then have a great summer thank you for joining us and we'll see you soon.