What in your point of view is wrong with the Clerk's office? How would you fix the budget problem?

What's wrong with the office, from where I sit every day: staff are overworked and demoralized. Some people can't get leave they've requested. Others clearly get away with more. There are favorites, and everyone knows who they are. On top of that, the building itself is failing the people working in it — a leaky roof, a smell that's probably mold, and the courthouse has lost power multiple times this year alone. None of that is something I can fix unilaterally if I win. The Clerk doesn't control the county's facilities budget or how leave and workload get managed day to day. What I can do is bring it into the open and advocate for it, specifically, in front of the people who do control it. That's a meaningfully different approach than what residents have seen from this office so far.

On the budget, I want to be straight rather than overpromise: the Clerk doesn't set fiscal policy, we execute a budget the commissioners hand us. Where I do think there's real room to move: passports and document kits are already generating revenue, and I think there's more there if we invest in it. Better engagement with residents through actual content — video, a real website, not a static page nobody reads — drives more of that revenue and more awareness of what this office does at the same time. And I'd want tighter inventory and cost controls generally, the same discipline any business applies to its own spending, applied here.