CHIN-UP, TOWN CLERKS

Deborah Markowitz, Secretary of State
VMCTA Meeting, June 4, 1999

I think this is because to an outsider your job looks perfect. No hassles, no deadlines, no difficult people to deal with, all day laughing and singing, happy in your work, eager to open, reluctant to close.

Of course, it isn’t that way at all, at least not all the time. Maybe it would be if you were the only town official, and what you said was the law. But, as Jean Paul Satrte said, "hell is other people." Here’s a list of the complaints we’ve received from town clerks who have called us lately:

1. The town manager has declared war on my office. He wants to absorb all of my duties. He wants me to report to him. He wants to evaluate my performance. When I resist, he threatens to recommend no salary adjustment for me until I agree to his demands.

2. The select board think I’m its secretary, and nothing I can do convinces them that it isn’t my job to type their correspondence, send out their notices and agendas, and rearrange my office and schedule to fit with their needs.

3. The Zoning Administrator expects me to open his locked files, find material for citizens when he’s not here, make copies, and make sure nothing is stolen or put out of place in the files.

4. There is this irrational person who keeps coming into my office day after day asking for things I don’t have, intimating that I have hidden them from him, expecting that if he asks often enough one of these days I will actually come up with what he’s looking for. Lately he’s been asking for permission to through all the files, including my personal files, to see what he thinks is there. Here he comes now.

Well, that doesn’t some so paradisiacal, does it? It’s always something. On the other hand, consider these experiences:

1. The town made a special effort to recognize you this year at town meeting, rewarding you with a round of applause. After that, people came up one after another to shake your hand and thank you personally for what you have done for the town and for them.

2. You were at the store or church or the fair, and suddenly everybody seemed to know you and smile, and wanted to be remembered, even though many of them were unfamiliar to you.

3. You found the long lost deed or birth or death certificate, after considerable hunting. This time, no crowds form to thank you. This is a private victory. It reminds you of the special talents you have developed. These are your records, and nobody does them better.

4. The day was a perfect one. The vault opened on the first try. The phone ran regularly enough to keep things interesting, but not so much as to bring on any sense of hysteria. You helped people, and they appreciated your work (and answered all of their questions). You had a good laugh. This is the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive.

The good days have to outnumber the bad, or you’d give up and not do this work any more. The good days made you interested in this work, and they made you a better clerk. The good days offset the bad ones, and make it all worthwhile.

The town clerk is an office like no other in the state. No other official has such influence. None other has such power to affect people’s lives so directly. None other so personifies the town or the ideal of duty and public service. So how does it feel to be an icon?

I do not mean to flatter. That’s not the point. The point is that in our daily lives there are many tensions, many failures, and many successes. We are honored for things we haven’t done and blamed for things others have done. We get stressed, and crabby, and want to run off into the night at times. Sometimes we find the courage and the inspiration to do wonderful things. That’s the nature of work and life.

Over across the mountain, in the next town, the clerk is in trouble. There is talk of converting the position to an appointive office, because the selectboard wants more centralized control. On the other side, there’s a clerk who fears retirement, not for her own sake, but because there's no one who seems to be interested in succeeding her. She wonders how long she can keep this up. Another goes to bed each night in tears, afraid of the assistant clerk, who clearly is having some kind of mid-life crisis and taking it out on the clerk.

This is a good time for clerks to stick together. The world is changing out there, and we’ve got to change with it, but nobody expects these changes are going to be easy. Let’s try to make sense of the issues at hand:

1. Appointive, not elective. In a few locations last year the subject of making the town clerk an appointive office was more than just talked about; there were serious movements to make it so, through charter changes. That’s the only way the conversion could occur, since general law doesn’t allow for such a shift.

The whole idea is centralization. I think that the world is growing so small so fast that there’s a feeling in the land that one body, in this case the select board and through it the manager or administrative assistant, really ought to control everything. Otherwise there’s no cooperation, goes the argument, and a waste of limited resources.

But you know what it means. It means control. Independence doesn’t fit well with serving a boss or bosses. They don’t have to keep you, and they won’t if you won’t go along with their plans. There’s a reason to preserve the independence of the clerk. The idea is this -- the more elective officials we have the freer we’ll be, because each officer will have to accept the responsibility for his or her work. Without a pecking order, everybody’s responsible, not just the top dog(s).

The reason we give a discrete office the responsibility for records is because they are so important that they warrant special attention. The day we assign these record keeping functions to some other office, already weighed down with other duties, is the day we see them start deteriorating.

I believe we must take a hard look at the impetus to make any town official appointive instead of elective, and see if it makes sense. In the case of a town clerk, in most cases, I don’t see it.

2. Secretarial Services ‘R Not Us. The way it used to be, the town clerk was secretary to the selectboard and any other board that asked. This was not a great idea, but one that had come to be because of the practical nature of keeping records, and using a typewriter. It ended rather abruptly for most towns in the early 1980s, when clerks all over Vermont said no. They said it nicely, but they said no, I’m not your secretary. Hire one or type the minutes yourself.

Now this was a good thing and a bad thing. It was good because the clerk attended every selectboard meeting, and there was a harmony between those offices. But it was a bad thing too, because it led to the invention of the idea that the clerk was staff to the selectboard, and could be ordered about.

People need boundaries, particularly in public life. The line that separates clerk and board ought to be well-defined. There needn’t be a war over it, lines drawn in chalk across the town office floor, but understanding who has what responsibility is an essential part of the arrangement of offices in towns. I’ve always thought the clerk is kind of a check on the legislative body. The clerk usually knows far more than they do, and can give signals, sort of like a referee with a whistle, when the board is about to commit a foul.

The right balance is for the clerk to remain fully informed about what the board does, without having to take responsibility for its work load. In some small towns, of course, this separation is impossible, but even there, for the sake of the town (and its officers) (and you too) everybody is always better off knowing where the duties of the town clerk begin and end.

3. Judged by the Quality of a Successor. Clerks’ salaries are still too low. But then who could blame the clerks for this? Having to convince a majority of the electorate that the clerk’s position is worth a living wage (for 1999) is difficult in any situation. A town never feels it’s doing well enough to afford what it needs. It’s the most conservative organization there can be. But salary is the most important factor in the decision of good people to run for the position of clerk.

I guess we don’t need recruiting posters for the office—"Uncle Ethan Wants You!"—for the position, but you can’t shortchange recruitment when the time comes for you to vacate your position or better yet a year before that happens. It isn’t your job, in one sense, but if you care about your reputation you’ll want to be sure that your successor is up to speed with the procedures and the practices once you’re retired. For that reason, you might become an advocate for better pay before a new incumbent begins, to ensure that you can attract the best people. More importantly, that you can inspire people to want the job for all the benefits it offers, beyond the pay.

There’s nothing so difficult as taking over the clerk’s office with no training whatsoever, and yet it happens each year in two or three towns. Some of this we can’t control of course, but there’s no reason why in most cases there ought to be some formal process of bringing an assistant on board and then do some real training so that the first day isn’t a nightmare.

4. Dealing with the Public. I know that it can be awful challenging to deal with the public day in and day out - but you know, they’re our bosses, and each of them wants something that’s only available from us. As difficult as they can be at times, it’s really not so hard to deal with the ugliest people if we move quickly through the steps needed to get them a certificate, a voter registration form, or dog license. Making no showing of impatience is the key. They don’t really hate us; most of them are just having a bad day, and they’re taking it out on us. Why? Because we are next. Maybe because we are government personified.

I know the life of a clerk isn’t easy. I know it is sometimes very difficult to handle the stresses of daily life in the town office. But you know, Vermont needs you. We need you to be the best clerk there has ever been in your town. We need you to be healthy and satisfied. For everybody’s good. We need you because you are the spine of the community, the heart of the town.