Trip to the Courthouse

I got to meet Pat Frank, Hillsborough County Clerk of Circuit Court. Click here to see what she looks like!

Pat gave a lovely monotone speech about the cool things she gets to do and all the cool things that have been happening around the court. She couldn't stick around to give us the tour but she had her helpers Dana Caranante and Doug Bakke to do that for her. Dana and Doug are pretty important people in the courthouse, too. 

Pat did spend some time talking about how big of a deal she really is.  She started serving on the school board, then the state senate, then the board of county commission.  She is the CFO for the county, responsible for a $1.8 billion budget.

Pat also stated a few fun facts.  She talked about how the courthouse receives 9,000-10,000 calls per day, how the dwindling economy caused budget cuts, eliminating jobs within the courthouse, causing her much stress in restructuring the responsibility to fewer people.  She also said tax deed sales are up (shocking!) and marriage licenses are down.  

Pat then went on to explain how the court knows it's important to have upgraded technology and an easy to use system (I know she didn't say it, but basically make the website easy to use for the dumb people, since it's dumb people that usually end up having to go to court in some way anyway).  They're trying to use less paper, improve customer service and all that jazz.

Pat had to leave and go to her meeting so she turned it over to Doug and Doug walked us through the website, showed us all the obvious stuff.  I was really bored by that, but he was just spelling it out for all the people that don't know how to figure out what the link meant.  Like "Online Forms" is pretty self-explanatory.  

Doug was more fun to pay attention to when we actually got up to tour the courthouse.  I love going places where people aren't used to being seen by strangers.  We went through a lot of "employees only" zones and we even got to see the evidence room.

Tour time!  We passed by the mental health records (confidential, of course) office, the appeals office, and the mediation room (where people try to resolve their cases themselves without lawyers and a judge).  We then went to the mortgage case filing room.  Wanna know how many foreclosure and mortgage cases there are in Tampa?  A LOT!  I saw a whole office room with shelf after shelf of file folders containing mortgage and foreclosure cases.  The people processing those cases get about 5 or 6 boxes full of cases per day.

We then got on the elevator (that I farted in) to go see the traffic and family law section.  Both places were not cool places to be.  The line for the traffic court was so long!  And many of the people standing in line looked pretty dirty and nasty and/or had little annoying children with them.  Family law didn't have as many of them, but that place reminded me of the jail.  There were lots of trashy looking people there.  I tried to imagine a situation where I would end up here and the only thing I could think of was if my boyfriend and I had a child and we broke up and had to fight over the kid.  So basically, it's where daddy has to pay child support or mommy is looking for daddy to get that child support.  It could also be vice versa.  But "single moms" are much more common than "single dads."  And I mean that as the person that's taking care of the kid.  Obviously a male parent is still a dad, but I don't call him a single dad if he's not taking care of the kid.

We eventually made our way to the evidence room and to our disappointment, nothing gruesome was in there at the time.  Mel and I'm sure other classmates were looking forward to see some severed fingers in the mason jars.  

So what did I learn?  Court is not a fun place to be... ok seriously.  All public records end up at the courthouse.  As a reporter, I will be spending much time at the courthouse while doing background research on someone.  Many records can be found online but for some of the older records and more personal records, a trip to the courthouse is a must.  So it would be a good idea to have a list of the records needed before going down there, of course.  Just trying to think ahead here.  More at 11.