 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. I'm Dan Lamyhoo County Board Chairman and I have with me Adam Payne, who is the co-host with myself of this monthly TV show. And we have with us today Julie Glancier, County Clerk. And today we are going to focus on that department, the County Clerk's office and on the duties of the County Clerk and the responsibilities and how the County Clerk's office works for the residents of Sheboygan County. Julie, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself first and how long you've been County Clerk. Okay, I've lived in Sheboygan County all my life. I'm married. My husband is the Chief of Police in Sheboygan Falls. I have two grown sons and I have a six year old grandson. I've been County Clerk. This is my sixth year. I worked in the County Clerk's office for about 10 years before that. And kind of all told, I have about 27 years of County Government. Well, six years ago when you decided to become County Clerk or run for the office. It's an elected office. It's elected. It's elected. When you decided to run for that office, what was your motivation for running for that office? For that office. Well, I really liked my job and probably for as long as I'd been there, I'd been driving my former boss a little crazy with, maybe if we did things this way or maybe we should do things that way. And I really felt I had a lot of ideas and a lot of things that I could bring to that position and making the office work better. And in response to that answer, some of the things you thought you could bring to the office, what are some of the roles and responsibilities and duties of the County Clerk? Well, we have probably the most varied duties of any office in the county. It sometimes seems like if they couldn't find somewhere else to put it, they put it in the County Clerk's office. We are in charge of the election process for Sheboygan County. We issue licenses. We're secretary to the County Board. Our office does the telephone system for Sheboygan County and the property and liability insurance. We also have on file a number of kind of bizarre and unrelated documents that we keep track of. Many of us have, if we have no other contact with your office, if we want to get married in Sheboygan County, we have to come to your office. That's correct. What is, you know, how many marriage licenses do you issue a year in and what is that process involved? Okay, we issue about 750 marriage licenses a year. If you're a resident of Wisconsin, you have to apply in the county you're being married or you're the county that you live in. So if you live in Sheboygan County, even if you're getting married somewhere else, you have to apply in my office. You need to bring something with your current address, driver's license, something like that. If you're under 30 years old, you need to bring a birth certificate. And if you've been married before, you need to bring some kind of proof as to, you know, how your last marriage ended. We need to know your social security number and you need to have a date set for your wedding. It's surprising how many people come in that really don't even have an idea of when they're getting married. It's kind of like they're walking down the street and they go, oh, I think, you know, we should get a marriage license today and they come in and they don't have any date set or anything, but you do need to have that. Because the license expires in 30 days, so you have a timeframe to use it in and if you don't have any plans made, we hate to take your money and then, you know, if I know that you can't use a license. What other licenses, you know, for us who have been married for some time now and don't intend to avail ourselves of that service, again, what other licenses would we come into your office to obtain? You would come in for conservation licenses, but you can get those in a lot of locations. We used to be much more involved with conservation licenses. We used to, when they were printed on paper, we would distribute them to all the dealers in Sheboygan County. Now that the state is on that electronic system where, you know, you plug the information into their little computer and then the licenses printed out as you're staying there, we don't have that responsibility anymore. So you'd come, you know, you can come to us for licenses, but there are a lot of other outlets for it also. The only thing we do that's different from the other outlets is we do the disabled fishing licenses, the military licenses, and senior citizen park passes. You mentioned that your office acts as the secretary to the county board and you do have certain functions that you deal with the county board of. Could you expand on that a little bit and what your involvement is with the county board? Sure, we do the minutes and the agendas, obviously for the county board itself, but we are also responsible for posting the agendas and compiling the minutes for the other committees. And that's really a huge undertaking in that there are many county committees and subcommittees and their agendas all have to be posted in compliance with the open meeting law, which means that it has to be available to the public at least 24 hours in advance of the meeting. So we've developed a system in our office that we stamp an agenda posted and the date and time and give that back to the committee so they have assurance that their meeting has been posted and it's a legal meeting. And we also audit the expense sheets for the county board supervisors. We compile the annual proceedings book, which lists all the everything that happened. We keep records of all the resolutions and ordinances going back to many, many years ago and indexes of all that. Any documents that they've, you know, annual reports, things like that, that they've generated or received, we have copies of those. Now you talk about the documents that people have to come in to receive from your office. The public also comes in to look up records and documents that they might be in need of. We also have the registered deeds office and it might be some confusion among the public if they're looking for a certain type of document. Where do they go? We have our administration building, a fairly new building and we have three floors and different offices. If somebody is looking for a certain type of document and where do they go and what type of documents do they look for or records do they look for in your office? Okay, it's sometimes a little confusing with the mayor's licenses because even though they apply in my office, the actual record of their mayor just kept in register of deeds. So they'd have to go there if they want a copy of that. We do though maintain an index of everyone who's applied for a marriage license. And sometimes if you only know the bride's maiden name, our office is the place you need to start to look in that index to find it. But we have an addition of course to the marriage applications and the county board things. We have coroner's dockets. We have highway relocation maps. We have the school district records from before they'd districted into the current system back. I think it was in the late 50s, early 60s when they'd districted and made the school districts. We have the records from the one house schools, the school census records. We have the records of how they came about with the redistricting with the school district. We have, I'm trying to think, veteran's grave records. We have, I always forget. I mean, this is so many weird things that we have. But we have the, oh, what am I looking for? Redistricting records and things like that. And I hadn't thought to ask this before, but I mean, that's quite a laundry list of records that you have. Are these paper records or are they microfilm or? They're paper records. And they're in your office. And they're in our office. And I've been in that office. And they've got the same records. Just to see there's that much room for it. Yeah, there is. We're going back to one-room schools and things like that. Yeah, well we have what we have for the one-room schools is books that are school census records. And they have one for every year where they went out and they checked how many kids you had in your family and their ages. And we haven't had use for those in a while, but for, there was a period of time where you had a lot of people who needed to prove their age for social security. And if they were born at home and there wasn't necessarily record and register of deeds, they needed to find the earliest reference to their date of birth. And they would look in those school census records and they could find themselves as early as one and two. Is there a time limit or a requirement that you have to keep a record for a certain number of years? Those records we could give to the State Historical Society. We haven't yet because we were having people coming in to look for them and rather than have them go to Madison or Milwaukee, to the Golden Maier Library in Milwaukee to find them. It was just better to keep them with us. And some of them we keep longer than probably we have to simply because people like to know that stuff. So we have it on hand. Just out of curiosity, how many requests do you get in an average week for different types of documents or records that people are looking for? Not a lot. Not a lot, no. But every once in a while, the other day we had a request for an old coroner record from the 1950s. So it's nice to have it there if you need it. Well, I know we have an election coming up right around the corner. And Adam, if you want to address some of the issues there in regards to the election. Sure. One of the things I've recognized in the last couple of years working with Julia, she's tremendously organized. You talk about where the records are all kept. Very organized and also, this brings a wealth of knowledge to the county board. One of the things you did mention is she also provides secretarial support to the finance committee, one of the most important committees in the county as well as the property committee. So she does a tremendous job juggling a lot of responsibilities. It's an election year. It's an exciting year and this November, sheboy and county constituents are gonna be making some very important decisions. What do you see as some of the primary races that are coming up? Well, obviously, besides the president, there's a U.S. Senate race. There's congressional races. We have a state Senate race. We also have races in all of our assembly districts. So. And how about with sheboy and county specifically? Do we have some offices? Well, all the county offices are up for election, but none of them have competition. I'll be darned. You're self included. That's correct. We like to think that's because we do such a good job, but I think it's probably because nobody wants that job. It's a difficult job. What is the county clerk's role in the election process? We do a lot of, in fact, almost all of the background work that needs to be done for the election. We register the candidates for the county offices, which in the fall is, of course, the county clerk and the treasurer and registered deeds. In the spring, we do the county board supervisors. The municipalities register all the people for mayor or aldermen and things like that. And the state registers your state candidates. And the district attorney, even though he only represents Sheboy and county, is really a state candidate. So he has to file with the state elections board rather than our office. But once we have people registered, we have to prepare the ballots and the ads that need to go out. We send out, we publish an ad saying there's an election coming up. If you're interested in running for these offices, you know, this is the ones that are open. We publish the absentee ballot ad, which tells people where they have to go to get an absentee ballot and the facsimile ad. And I brought a sample of that. And that's probably the one people are most familiar with because it's this flyer that's stuffed in the paper usually the day before the election. We got more involved with the elections of the municipalities when we went to the optical scanning ballots. Prior to that, we only need to concern ourselves with the state, federal and county races. But once we went to optical scan and everything's on one ballot, we now have to know what's on everybody's ballot, every school district ballot, every municipal ballot and things like that. So do you see much variation on the ballots or are they all consistent? They're very different. In the fall, even though it's a bigger turnout election, you have more people, you have fewer combinations of congressional aldermanic, or not aldermanic assembly districts. So we only usually have about five. But in the spring, we have as many as 102 combinations of school district, municipal, county board combinations. So you have to make sure everybody gets the right combination and some of those combinations represent as few as like two people. I'll be there. I'll be there. And so with the development of the ballots, what's your timeframe to do that? Not a lot of time. In November, for example, the state elections board will certify the candidates for the November ballot to us on the 26th of this month. I have to ballots printed by the 6th of October. So it's not a big turnaround time for us to get the information to the printer. And with the optical scan ballots, they have to be printed very precisely and cut very precisely. So it's a time consuming process for the printer. Now, we may have some viewers that haven't voted before or perhaps moved in the county. What steps do they need to take to register to vote? The only municipalities that have pre-registration are the cities. The city of Chicago, city of Plymouth, city of Falls. None of the townships or municipalities have pre-registration. So you would just show up at the polling place with your identification, something with your address, like a driver's license or a rent receipt or a utility bill, something like that. In the cities, you can pre-register at the municipal clerk's office. Okay. How many voting locations are there throughout the county? There are 43. There are 43, and if I don't know where to go, how do I get that information? You can call our office and we can tell you. If you live in a township or a village, it's more often than not, their town hall or their village hall. If you live in the city of Sheboygan, however, you're gonna each know what ward you're in. So if you give us a street address, we can tell you the ward and that will tell you where to vote. And are you expecting a high turnout for November? We're hoping for a good turnout in November. We're thinking around 55,000. Very good. Well, with that, I'll turn it back to the chairman. The, with all the different polling places, is there any requirement as to the hours of the polling places? The state requirement is that they open at nine and close at eight. They all have to close at eight o'clock, but they can open earlier than that. And the city of Sheboygan polls all open at seven. Some of the county places open at seven and eight. Most of them are nine o'clock in the county. And that information is all in. It's all in the ad that's published what time the poll opens and where it is. And again, if there was some confusion, they could call your office as to when, when the polling place would open. And we get the most calls in November because there are a lot of people who vote for the president and that's the only time in four years they vote and they've forgotten in between. Recently, Julie, you and I were both at the state county's convention. And there was some discussion there and including a seminar on redistricting. And most of our, hopefully all of our readers have filled out their census form and have been counted. And eventually we'll get those numbers. And one of the things that counties have to do is work on redistricting along with the state and federal government. What is our responsibility as a county and more specifically your responsibility as a county clerk in regards to redistricting? Okay, the counties have the first responsibility in redistricting. They get the numbers and from those numbers they develop their supervisory districts. Those districts then get transferred to the municipalities and they need to make their ward boundaries and their aldermanic districts out of whatever we give them as our county supervisory districts. So when we get the numbers we'll divide that population by how many supervisors we have which is 34 and that will tell us how many people we need to try and put in every district. The last census it was about 33,200 per district. And it's our job to try and make all those districts as even in population as we can. So one of the problems then is the population shifts. Absolutely. Or as the population increases more dramatically in one area of the county than in another area we have to change the boundaries of a district. So an individual might who has been represented by a given county board supervisor or a city alderman for years could find themselves in a different district because of shifts in population. Because of shifts in population. We try to stay as close as we can to the last district because you like to keep people like that sense of security of having their same area but you can't do that. You wanna make sure that you get everybody equal representation. And you talked about the county has to start the process. Could you give us a little feeling for the time involved? I mean we have, we're now in the fall of 2000 and by this time next year we need to be starting to think about elections in the spring of 2002. If I've got my years all correct. But during this next 12 months between now and this time next year, what is the timetable a little bit as to what's going to be happening? We should get the numbers from Madison or the Census Bureau sometime the end of March, April 1st somewhere in there. Then we have until November to finalize our plan but in between that time the municipalities have to have their wards drawn also. So we need to get our initial plan to the municipalities because sometimes if they have legitimate concerns about where you've drawn your line, the county can then go back and readjust their boundaries to try and help out the municipalities. I know that there's been some discussion locally about changing the size of county government or other levels of government. Maybe, and I know this is not your problem. This is my problem as a county board chairman and as county board supervisor. That's our problem, that's not your problem. But maybe you could address just a little bit as to if the county board would change the size of their, the number of supervisors. Which would obviously affect the size of the district that each supervisor would be representing. How this could affect other levels of government? Sure, it affects the cities probably the most because usually townships and villages elect their representatives at large. They represent the entire town or the entire village. So if we divide them into two or three pieces or no pieces, it doesn't really impact their elections. But the cities, because they elect their alderman by ward, you can mess them up a lot by how you draw your lines. In the city of Sheboygan, for example, right now we have 16 county board supervisors that represent the city of Sheboygan and they have eight aldermanic districts. So it becomes real simple math to say that you have 16 wards and two of them for our free alderman and the math becomes real simple. But if the county board changes the size or if the population shifts so that there are now 15 supervisors that represent the city of Sheboygan, the math becomes much more difficult in trying to get eight aldermanic districts and 15 county board supervisor districts. So if we would decide as a county board that we're now going to have 14 supervisors representing the city of Sheboygan, the easiest way to accomplish this would be for the city of Sheboygan to say we're going to have 14 aldermanic districts with... That would be the simplest way. It would be the simplest way. But that level of government would have to agree to that. Right. Or we'd have to have 50-some wards so that we could do it. And in the city, you know, their alderman have to represent the same number of people also. So you're going to create kind of odd little areas that are difficult to deal with. So... And expensive to deal with because you'd have to create a ballot style then for each of those separate wards which adds to the cost of the ballot. So the next 12 months, well, there would be some very interesting discussions between county government, city government, and this whole redistricting procedure. Anything else that you might want to tell us about your involvement as county clerk and your involvement either with the county board or with the population, the residents as they come into your office? Well, good question. With elections, one of the other things that we do that I kind of forgot to mention is we program the election voting equipment. And that is a really big job in that we have to make sure that all the ballots count properly, that the municipalities have the right ballot and that the machine that they have is going to count the ballots that they have. And not all the municipalities have election equipment. We have 11 that do not. And it's really a disadvantage to those voters because especially in the primary election where you had the ability to cross over both one party and another party, if you had a voting machine in your municipality, that machine would have kicked your ballot back to you and said you've made a mistake. If you don't have election equipment and that ballot comes to central count to be counted, you know, it's just kind of too late. That brings up something that happens the night of election. And I had never done this before, but your office, the night of election is the center of the reporting, the activity. Candidates are there getting their last minute results. What actually happens that night in your office? Okay, well, the municipalities that have machines will bring us their election results and they bring them to us on prom packs. This is where their results are found and all the information about their election. It's kind of like a game packet from a game package. Is this what comes out of the machine that you stick your ballot in? This is what comes out of the machine and this is what we program and all the information is in here. Then we load those or download those into our computer system. So anybody who has a machine, their election results, as soon as they come in to us are downloaded into our system. The municipalities that don't have machines come in with their ballots locked up in a case and then they're counted on machines in our office and then we load those results up. So you have that cartridge. Now there's a close election. Somebody wins by five votes. And the loser is going to say, I'd like a recon. I hope you have more than just that cartridge to do your recon. Yes, the advantage to the optical scan over the old lever machines is that you always have the paper ballots. If someone chooses not to believe the information that came out of here or we did have one election where a prom pack was dropped and damaged. So when the results came back to us, they had like a thousand voters but like 300 votes showed up on this prom pack and you knew that that wasn't correct. You can go back to the actual ballots and physically count the marks on the ballots. And if there is a question as to a recount that's what you would do. You would actually count the actual ballots. You would count the actual ballots. When we had the recount two years ago for the writing candidate for sheriff, there was no other way for us to do that other than to look at the ballots. Because the election equipment will record that you connected the arrow next to the right end but it has no way of knowing what name you wrote down. So that all has to be done by hand. And how long do you, if there's a question and you do have to do a recount, what is the timetable that you have to do the recount and how long do you keep these paper ballots? Well, you have three days from the end of Canvas Board and what Canvas Board is is that when the election results come to us, the next day we have a Democrat, a Republican and someone from my office, go through the results. We verify that the number of people who voted on the poll list is not less than the number of ballots that are showing up on the tape. We verify what right end candidates are actual candidates. Sometimes people will connect the arrow for right end but don't write in a name. So you have to adjust those right end totals based on that. We will physically go through three municipalities. We draw those by lot to make sure that the numbers that are machines totaled are the numbers that came off on the tape at the end of the night. And once we have those results and we've certified those other results, candidates have three days from the end of that to recross to recount. So the night of the election, if somebody really wants to know the up to the minute results. We know that. You have a tally board? Yes, we have two public computers that people can go into and look at and get detailed results of all the races. As they're loaded. As they're loaded. So if you're there at 9.30 and you've done, as you see, 45% of the results are in and so-and-so is leading by 50% to 51 to 49, you would have a running tally in the office. Yes, we have a running tally and the machine also tells you how many of the other precincts they're in. Because like in some of the assembly districts or senate districts, it's not the entire county. So even though you maybe have 45% of the county and you may only have 20% of that particular district in and the machine will tell you that. Do a lot of people appear in your office to look at these computers? It depends, sometimes. It depends on the election and how close some of them are contested. We usually have about a dozen and people are sold, sometimes more. Usually candidates or the- Candidates, news media, people from the different political parties. Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of fun. And we always have snacks. So if you want to come in, you can have snacks. I'll be there. I just had one last question for Julie. At the beginning, you touched on many of the roles, responsibilities you have. And again, for our viewers, what are some of the key areas that they can call you or come into your office and get assistance? Marriage licenses. Marriage licenses, election questions, county board information. And because we do the phone system and things, generally, if you don't know where else to call, if you call us, we can direct you somewhere. Great. Well, very interesting, Julie. We've had, what, three departments now. We've had the finance department. We've had- Healthcare centers. Healthcare centers. We had Gene Larby, the director of healthcare centers. We've had finance department. Now we've had county clerk's office. And when are we gonna run our departments? 10 years from now? I mean, we have so many departments in county government that it's gonna take a while to run our departments. But next month, we are going to be focusing on the sheriff's department. Sheriff Kenig is going to be here. Some of the things we'll probably be talking about are the 800 megahertz radio system that the county is in the process of over a two-year period replacing the radio system and radios throughout the county, all the municipalities, including the county government. And the detention center. I'll be talking about that a little bit. We have a relatively new detention center with two phases of the project completed. And that's the area that we will be discussing next month. And again, it's gonna take us a lot of months to bring all our departments in. But for the viewers, if you have any questions or suggestions for future programs, if you have any different departments that you're interested in that you would like to see us cover in this program, feel free to call the administrative coordinator's office, my office at the administration building. I'm not there as much as Adam is, but what is the phone number? 459-3103. 3103. And I don't keep that number up here because I don't call it that often, but if you have something that you would like to have us talk about, call that office, and we'd be happy to set up a program in the future dealing with that subject. So we thank you for watching. We always appreciate your comments, your reaction to these programs and suggestions. We're here, as our program says, we're working for you. We're here to serve you. And as we bring our different programs to you, we would really appreciate some feedback and some comments as to how we can better serve you. And with that, we'll see you next month. Thank you.