Is there anything about this race you're not allowed to talk about because you still work there?

Managing this is a challenge every day, and I would wager that there are people in the office who don't even know I'm running. I stay extremely cautious about how I behave while at work and I am committed to providing the same level of service to the judges, attorneys, and general public that I have been doing for the last year. But I believe that I can genuinely make the clerk's office a better place to work for the employees, more effective for the general public, and a leaner operation that is more focused on the outputs. So it's worth the extra headaches, and the attention to what I am saying publicly.

I'm careful not to discuss personnel matters — specific staffing decisions, individual performance, internal HR situations. That would be inappropriate regardless of whether I'm a candidate or not. I'm also not going to share anything that could be considered confidential to ongoing court proceedings or that would compromise the integrity of the office I currently serve.

What I can talk about — and do talk about freely — are the public-facing gaps I've observed firsthand. How residents experience the office when they walk in. What information is hard to find on the website. Where the communication between the office and the public breaks down. What it actually looks like when someone shows up to court without an attorney and tries to navigate the system on their own. None of that is confidential. All of it is a matter of public experience.

The honest answer is that working inside the office while running for it creates a tension I think about. I navigate it by staying focused on what the public deserves to know rather than what happens behind closed doors. The public's experience of this office is fair game. That's what this campaign is built on and it's what I'll keep talking about.