What is one of my greatest priorities? Transparency in government. Transparency in government creates good government. Transparency was a core tenet of the Founding Fathers in order to ensure a government functioned of the people, by the people and for the people. What a radical statement in an era that had seen hundreds of years of government run by one ruler and his (once in a while, her) favorites who dispensed goods and services to their cronies.
Role of County Clerk
The County Clerk is the Clark County Commission’s secretary and keeper of the official public records for the Commission’s decisions. All ordinances, appointments and large contracts go to the Commission for approval. The Clerk maintains the permanent public record of those decisions so that the county constituents can see what their government is doing on their behalf.
Why Your Vote Ensures Government Transparency
The position is an elected one so that the Clerk has independence and cannot be fired or coerced into changing what the official record shows. We keep permanent records of marriages, fictitious firm names and commission decisions.
Transparency isn’t Easy
When I got into office I was the 10th Clerk to oversee the permanent public record archive. Over the century, Clerks had various systems for management and storage who had tried their best to keep up with changing technologies. But, over a century, the archive and the systems used had become disjointed, hard to access and the opposite of transparent. Decades of records were transferred to Digital Reel, microfilm and microfische. these technologies are rapidly degrading and the information needs to be extracted in order to be there in another 100 years.
the Journey for Government Documents
goal has been to turn this disjointed, degraded archive into one that is clean, complete, transparent and safe. This has been a decade’s long, multi-step effort. The Clerk’s records are kept in systems specifically designed for these kinds of records. As you can imagine, these systems also change over time. When you update your system and convert a million records from one software to the next, inevitably errors occur. What I call “combing through the records” helps create a clean database. Even after multiple “combings” errors remain. For instance, someone called the office because their friend couldn’t find their marriage record and the person who called had been at the wedding so they knew the marriage had taken place. We did a manual search and found their record as well as a few thousand others that during a previous conversion had had an additional digit added so that the search tool was unable to find them. This is one fix that added thousands of missing documents to our database.
Actions Taken to Improve Transparency
- Created a Records Management Division to address record accuracy, AI and security concerns
- Converted summary minutes to complete transcripts of commission, zoning, debt management and Board of Equalization meetings
- Continue to digitize historical archives
- Finalizing 10-year effort to provide public facing records search tool
- Added multiple foreign language translations and ADA compliancy to critical public facing documents such as the marriage license application
If government transparency is important to you, I humbly ask for your vote in November.
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