Failing Grade for Clerk

The reputation of county government service got a well-deserved black eye recently with the release of a management report highly critical of Orange County Clerk-Recorder Lee Branch and the way his office is run.

In what some county officials have called one of the harshest and at the same time most constructive management studies that they have seen, the report criticized the clerk-recorder’s office for “rude behavior” toward the public, and noted that an adversary atmosphere in the office pitting deputy clerks against the public “is often echoed in relationships between staff and supervisors.” Clinging as we do to the old-fashioned notion that staffs in public agencies should look on the taxpaying public as people to be served, not as antagonists, the finding that the attitude outside rubs off inside is doubly distressing.

The audit team also reported that it “did not find top management receptive to suggestions or improvements.” That has been obvious during the years since the separate and elective posts of county clerk and county recorder were merged in 1979, and in the fact that Branch has done little to reflect the merger. The offices still operate as separate agencies, failing to take advantage of the potential economies and efficiency that a true merger of the operations should have brought about.

For most Orange County residents the work of the office ranges from no-profile to low-profile, but the office is responsible for a number of important functions that include maintaining Superior Court files and recording and storing public documents such as property grant deeds and birth certificates.

Efficiency and promptness are qualities to be admired in any public agency, but in the handling of court records, for example, the qualities are essential. The office has been under criticism from the county board, judges, lawyers and others both for what they consider bad attitudes and for the backlog of work that continues to pile up. Last year the state’s 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana issued more than a dozen orders threatening to hold Branch in contempt for often taking months to comply with requests to forward files on Superior Court trials that the justices needed to review.

Those and other problems are what prompted the county board to order the management study in the first place--a study that has has produced 157 recommendations to improve the office’s operations, morale and its negative attitude toward the people whom it serves.

Branch has indicated that he is ready to cooperate in implementing the recommendations. It’s about time, and a good place to start will be in combining the everyday functions for which he is responsible and that go with the hyphenated title that he was so eager to assume in 1979. If he doesn’t, the public can make needed changes when it conducts its own management audit at the polls in the 1986 county election.