Episode 99: Clerks
This historic, fascinating and expansive world of municipal clerks is the focus our latest episode. Folks who believe clerks mostly just serve to prepare agenda packets and record council vote outcomes might be surprised by how far and wide the job goes. It's one of the most public-facing roles in town hall; generally, the clerk is the one employee that law requires municipal governments to have. Municipal Equation traveled to Cherokee recently for the annual conference and 50th anniversary of the NC Association of Municipal Clerks to record perspectives, wisdom and nuance that people might not realize about the profession. Learn more about the NC Association of Municipal Clerks: https://www.ncamc.com/
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Transcript
From the North Carolina League of Municipalities, this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns. Thank you for joining us. On this episode, we're going to explore one of the more interesting jobs in local government. And, yes, lots of interesting jobs in that context, but this is one loaded with a mix of expansive demands, often to extents that people don't realize, and lots of sensitive work duties. And even though it's one of the more public facing and public interacting jobs in all of local government, it's also one that I don't think the general public fully understands or gets to fully appreciate just how much this person does on the job. That's the job of clerk, the clerk at city hall or the clerk to your county board of commissioners. And since this job is a production of the League of Municipalities, we're gonna focus on municipal clerks here today, those working in cities and towns, for how actually interesting and action packed the job can be. I had a chance to speak with a few of them at a recent statewide conference of municipal clerks who came in from all over the state to network and learn from each other. This is the North Carolina Association of Municipal Clerks, NCAMC. And this year, 2025, they've marked their fiftieth year as an association. I went to that conference with a camera and some lav microphones and did some sit down interviews with different clerks who were at different points in their careers. Here's some quick samples.
For someone who has done it as long as I've done it, folks tend to ask me, am I am I bored? I mean, aren't you ready to retire? And when I think I am, something is new. So there's no boring moments in in my clerk's office.
Sometimes it's just fascinating to me to think about the minutes that I'm writing now could be referenced in a hundred years from now. Being a municipal clerk, you kinda you kinda have your hand in every single project going on throughout the town.
Let's flush out that context really quick. While I was at the NCAMC conference in their celebration of five decades as a professional association for clerks, they had a table set up with some memorabilia and some old documents and photos and so on from past years to look back and reminisce on. And one of them was an old NCAMC pamphlet that I picked up and opened. And on the inside was a really great written history of the job itself, really interesting history of clerk. The word clerk or at least the context of clerk goes back to ancient times, before biblical times, as being defined as remembrancer or reminder, people who keep the archives, things we need a record of. And And it said in the pamphlet that before writing came into use for such things, the clerk's memory served as the public record. For myriad reasons, including practical and procedural, the role of clerk filled out and solidified over time really prestigiously, very important to keep documents and records and important references. It said that in England, the office of clerk as a specific thing can be traced back to the year December to keep council members up to speed and reminded of what happened at previous council meetings but also having various other important jobs in the ensuing centuries like serving as diplomat for the king. The clerk did that. A pretty affirming statement on the job of municipal clerk comes from an English court in the Middle Ages. Quote, the office of town clerk is an important part of machinery in local government. He may be said to stand between the local council and the ratepayers, end quote. Getting into this part of the world, we can look back at the Plymouth, Massachusetts days back in the sixteen hundreds when colonists came over and they pretty much right away appointed somebody to be clerk to record the important stuff, the vital records, birth records, marriage records, deaths, livestock ownership, who got appointed to what role, deeds, actions at meetings, elections, all that stuff. And so Clerk was one of the earliest offices established in government there to keep the government record accurate. Fast forward to today, a quarter of the way through the twenty first century, which is kinda wild to think about, clerks have to stay up and aware of all kinds of things going on in the world, things that might find their ways into the city council chambers, all kinds of people to interact with from people requesting public records or maybe wanting to address the city council during the public comment section of their meeting about a a grievance they might have or providing documents to people requesting them for all sorts of reasons. There are all kinds of laws and policies dictating what the clerk's job is in different situations. You get it. It's an interesting job with all kinds of duties, a lot of interesting history, and these clerks have to stay up on things happening technologically that might affect how information is recorded and exchanged. Let's talk right now with some of the people in this job. These are interviews I did in Cherokee, North Carolina in August at the NC Association of Municipal Clerks annual conference in their fiftieth year as an association.
Let's go to the clerk for Davidson, North Carolina. Her name is Betsy Shores, and she's the second vice president for the Association of Municipal Clerks. So I've been the town clerk in Davidson for seven and a half years. Prior to working in Davidson, I worked for the town of Cornelius. I was administrative assistant. It's a public information work for the Cornelius Police Department. Mhmm. And I sort of always thought a town clerk position would would fall within my career, but maybe later on in my local government career. And the town clerk position in Davidson opened up in 2018, and my husband actually was the one that encouraged me to apply. So I just took a chance and went and applied and got the job. The key part of this role is really the historical data that you are keeping for the town, and sometimes it's just fascinating to me to think about the minutes that I'm writing now could be referenced in a hundred years from now. We do go back and look at minutes from forty, fifty years ago to see why the town made the decisions that they did to maybe name a park, name a road, how they spent the budget. So that part of the minute taking is really interesting to me that the clerk, that's the key role that they do for the town is keeping those history minutes.
Here's Robbie Wagner. He's the clerk for Stokesdale, North Carolina. When I asked him what kept the job interesting. I guess it's it's never the same thing. Every day, it's a little bit different, which I love about it. I I hate while I love routine, from, an aspect of of keeping things structured, I don't like to be bored. Being a municipal clerk, you kinda you kinda have your hand in every single project going on throughout the town. You know, you have your primary goals of keeping records and and having meetings running smoothly, but, that's just a small piece of the job. You know, you you continue, every day to find new things to do. Council relies heavily on on the town clerk, and, so it's it's it's a unique job. I I feel like, you know, there's certainly the statutory responsibilities, but that's just the bare minimum. There's so much more that that you do. And so Mhmm. That's what I enjoy about it. Different thing every day. We're twenty four seven pretty much, and there's always always something that has to be done. And this is a clerk I've known for a very long time, Penny Spicer Sidbury.
Last year was the NC Association of Municipal Clerks Clerk of the Year. She's been with the city of Wilmington for forty years, thirty one of those years as city clerk. She said the woman who held the role before her had been there for forty three years.
When the council hired Penny, she was the first African American woman in this very essential role for the city in Wilmington. The city clerk's position or role is pretty much what anyone will tell you is is more or less mandatory. So you can run a city or or a town with, just a city clerk. Mhmm. That's the major position that you must have as a municipality.
That's true in North Carolina. For each municipality, the clerk is generally the one job required by law. And to get an appreciation of all that can fall into the clerk's arena, I asked Penny to get detailed about her job over the years.
So, yes. I am the face of city hall sometimes. I do handle and oversee all the official records. And I think last check, last year we closed out, we had almost 900 public records requests. 900 public records requests. Requests. All kinds of things. All kinds of things. So record requests, the council has a policy only comes to me and I review, process, and disperse to the department heads that are affected by the request. You have to be organized. It's a must. You must understand that it's not about you and your role is in my case I have seven bosses and each of them have something different, different personality, different wants but you must treat them all the same. So if one asks for something then all seven will get it for me. If you want to do policy different, I gotta have four votes. It's gotta be something that's done by the council. And you have to be kind and humble and professional to respond when you say to a board member I'm so sorry I can't do x y z because that's the council policy decision, you make the laws and the rules I'm just here to implement. And so it is a key role, it's it's extremely important. The media is some of my favorite people. I have to deal with them a lot. I think Wilmington is probably one of two cities that's left with a civil service commission for the PD and for the fire department. I'm also the staff person that oversees all that. So the city has about 34 boards and commission. All of that falls underneath my office. Now we have staff that serves as staff people to these boards and commissions, but I'm the one that has to make sure attendance is taken, minutes are taken, agendas are done, meetings are posted. I have to post all the meetings for anything in the city that they're holding. I have to be the gatekeeper of the records. I have to make sure that, when council makes a decision, yes, there's a there's a motion, there's a second, it gets carried, but I have to make sure that if there's an amendment or an addendum, that document has to be revised before I put it in the official records. So sometimes I have to send a couple reminder notes to the manager and the attorney, to be reminded because it's their responsibility.
But I'm the person that said the end of all of that, so I gotta make sure it gets done. While clerk is generally the one city job required by law, law further lays out responsibilities for cities that clerk is often assigned to or does as part of the job, like with those 900 public records requests, open meetings, and the segments of meetings reserved for public comment. Public information is real popular, so every city has to have a certain amount of time designated on their agenda,
whether it's first meeting, second meeting, but at some point, the public needs to be able to sign up to speak under public information at accounts meeting. Mhmm. What council rule says is that they'd like for it to be something in reference to either something that's on the agenda or something that comes under the umbrella of the city council. Well, that doesn't always happen because I'm like the liaison in the middle that has to be able to receive those concerns or complaint, whether it be from the public, whether it be from the staff, whether it be from the department heads, to facilitate that. So I kinda keep people on point. I kinda keep people, on schedule. I kinda try to remind my folks, my seven folks, of what they did or didn't do and be reminded that the public has high expectations. Tomorrow night's council meeting, we have we only can take 10 speakers, but I have 15 people signed up. And so I've got to make sure that and I've set it all up before I left, is that we've met the rule with the 10 people. My staff will call or contact those 10 folks to to confirm that they still wanna speak because the five that are waiting can make you come in if someone's changed their mind. Right. So I've gotta make sure that that's smooth before tomorrow night's council meeting. And so when you come tomorrow night, you're gonna have all the folks wanting to speak, and I'm using the face that you see. In fact, we've got one guy who has signed up every meeting. So so with the the 10 people or, you know, say, like, 20 people sign up, but you can accommodate 10, do do do you know what they're gonna talk about in advance? They put it on they they tell us in advance what their subject is. And if they get up there and talk about something else, normally the mayor will stop them because I have to tell the council. I do a memo to tell them this is who's speaking and this is who this is what it's in reference to because sometimes it may be where we need to get the council may need backup information, like, you know, have you talked to city staff? What have we done with this person? And the big thing is what folks don't understand is the the law of their requirement for policy is they don't have to say anything. They just have to listen. So if you ask them a question, they don't have to respond. They may not respond. If you say demand x y z, they just they don't have to because they're gonna direct the staff to do whatever the staff needs to do to accommodate what your wishes are. But, yes, I do have to tell them what the folks are coming to talk about.
While so many aspects of the job are in adherence to law, Betsy Shores from the town of Davidson noted how world circumstances can also transform the job, how it functions. I will say
with the COVID pandemic, that really took a shift in how government is transparent. We had to move to online. When we went into lockdown, I quickly taught our management team how to be on Zoom. Mhmm. It was like this new fascinating thing to us, and we actually still joke about how Yeah. It was like the first night everybody was home, and I'm saying here, use this link, get online. Okay. Can you hear me? Hi. Can you hear me? And then not knowing that we were gonna have to do public meetings for the next year and a half via Zoom Mhmm. And learning how to bring people in and out of conference room, you know, in and out for speaking, that was a big pivot that we had to do as clerks because it was on us to learn and be able to still be transparent. Is
the technology sort of a an aspect of of what you do or the changing nature of technology and how the engagement is recorded and what counts and what doesn't? I mean, how was that changed with us? So we the town of Davidson moved into a new building two years ago, so I had an opportunity
to make technology improvements in a brand new council chamber. And we used to only have one camera in our old room, so now I have two cameras, but I'm controlling those cameras, between the podium speaker to the dais while also redoing the minutes for the meeting, and helping run the PowerPoints. So technology changes in that sense have really changed a lot since I've started as a clerk
seven years ago. Robbie Wagner from Stokesdale. How how have you seen the job or how do you see the job kinda changing over time? In the future, I I can see, like you said, AI is a big thing right now. It's still
you know, just a lot of us, it's still new. It's just now kinda hit the mainstream. I know it's been around for a while. Mhmm. But it's one of those things. It's progressing faster and faster every day. Yeah. So it's it's kind of neat to watch it happen, watch it unfold in real life. So I'm curious to see how it fits into local government. I I'm hopeful that, elected officials and and, your your public workers are open to the idea of AI. I know that it's kind of a scary thing to some folks, but I think that if they use it wisely, it can really be a good resource. And, I think it will will help out immensely, especially the clerk's role. There's so much, there's so many tasks that you you spend, you know, like minutes. You know, you're constantly listening to tape, you're watching audio, You're you're going back and and, trying to figure out who said what, and you're you're trying to you're doing your best to to take all this conversation in, like, you know, four hours worth of a meeting and condense it down into a few pages of minutes. Right. And it's it's impressive to see that some of these softwares use AI to do that in a matter of seconds. Mhmm. Something that takes most of us, you know, days.
The already robust but still changing world of the local government clerk makes groups like the NC Association of Municipal Clerks important as they keep up with one another to trade notes and observations and keep eyes on how forces like legislation might also shape what they do. It's good to have organization and institutional knowledge around, Robbie said.
Well, it's still important to have paper documents. No doubt about it. You're required to keep paper documents. You know, we're seeing more and more cloud storage. We're seeing folks using, you know, digital agenda packets now and stuff like that. That's that's still a new thing. You know, we're still old school. We still have paper packets. Mhmm. But people are kinda moving into that digital era, and so it's, it's neat to watch. You don't need to work in a bubble. Don't feel like you're alone. You know, a lot of times, the clerks kinda get thrown into the role, and there's not much instruction because there's so many folks who don't really know what a clerk does. Mhmm. And so Yeah. If you work with, you know, other folks and you get their input and, you can bounce questions off of them, you can give them advice, they can give you advice, that's super important. So find yourself a good group of folks to work with, and then, you know, of course, find a mentor,
find a group of mentors, listen to them, take their advice, ask questions. I asked Penny what she would tell clerks who were earlier in their careers. A lot of it was about awareness.
My advice right off the bat is to remember it's not about you, and be reminded it's about the constituents and the public people that are in need. It's also about learning who your elected officials are and kinda go around the room, so to speak. So I'm city government, but I also wanna know about the New York County commissioners. I also wanna know about the beach communities because at some point, we're gonna be interacting. I tell them to get in place and take a moment to go online, see what's happening in Raleigh, see what the legislation is doing legislators are doing. Look at those rules of procedure. Look at the retention schedule because it's going to help you know when to be rid of records, what records you have to keep. And and folks, a lot of my small clerks now are dealing with minutes. Mhmm. Everyone does minutes differently. Mhmm. And if you're new, you need to fill out what your board preferred because when I started, I had a board that wanted detailed minutes. So everything was pretty much worth your work. But as time went by, that got that got better. Be reminded that you need to be professional. You need to increase you need to do all you can to research and do something different each day. But what am I saying? What I'm saying is if the day I went in and I don't know how to do minutes all the way, but I'm willing to learn, you can reach out to someone in the Clark Association. We have a a group that we match up. We are one type attitude, that you can mirror image. You can go in or as I've gone actually to different municipalities just to observe how they do their business to say, you know what? I will suggest this and this, and they appreciate it. And be invested. Be be about money and dollars are important. Your salary is important, but you gotta love what you do. Mhmm. And if you don't, then this is not for you. Right. And it's a position that may not be for you. It it might be too demanding. It might be, I don't wanna work for elected officials. I mean, if that's the case, then you don't need to be here. And you need to love you need to love those citizens despite what they may say or do. Mhmm. And give them some time because sometimes you can find that I'm the upfront person before you get to those seven people, and I may can help them and connect them with resources that you don't have to pretty much bog down your council. And that's really so when they come to Tuesday night council meeting, they're taking action. They've they've taken everything into consideration. You give them all the data. Sometimes we have folks that wanna meet the mayor one on one. Well, my mayor is open, but he's extremely busy. And so if you can help me help you, it's wonderful. And that's what I tell the clerks where you need to be the front person, put yourself in that line first, and be able to put that fire out if you can do it. Not saying create your own rules, but if you can do it,
it'll make life so much better. It it's it's very rewarding. I mean, it's good to know that you're you're kind of that liaison between the people and council. Although they're they're there for the people too. They can't be everywhere all at once, so they can't be at town hall at all times. And so you're there. So it's good to to be the face of the town hall. Folks come in. They look for you. They ask questions. They know that if they talk to you, you'll get the job done or you at least get it to council. But it's it's super rewarding, especially in a small town. I know that, it can be different larger towns. You feel like a smaller piece of a much larger picture, but even there, it's still you're you're making a difference. And, at a small town like Stokesdale, you know, it's, it's you just you make a difference every day. You can actually see the change happen. People come in with a problem, you do something about it, and you can actually see the outcome. And and it's it's amazing. That's all the rewards you need right there. It's great.
Thanks for hanging out with us on this episode and with our guests, Betsy Shores from Davidson, Robbie Wagner from Stokesdale, and Penny Spicer Sidbury from Wilmington, North Carolina. Again, Penny was the 2024 Clerk of the Year. Congratulations, by the way, to the 2025 Clerk of the Year, Lisa Stites, with the town of Oak Island, also someone I've known for almost twenty years at this point. I know I learned some things I wasn't too familiar with prior about our clerks, the job required by law in our cities and towns, I hope for obvious reasons at this point, given what we've covered. There's no quiz, but if you do have any thoughts, anything following up about this episode, anything you were surprised by, or if you're a Clerk and you have stories from the field, I would love to hear from you. Municipal Equation, the podcast you're watching or listening to right now, is, I guess, you could think of it as a hangout spot for conversation topics in the world of cities and towns and municipal government. How we make the communities we want to live in, what goes on with the planning of those futures, how do we work together, share knowledge and ideas, come up with solutions to historic or emerging issues. The North Carolina League of Municipalities puts this show out every month with a different topic in that arena, and you can suggest episode topics. Matter of fact, a lot of our best episodes have come from phone chats, emails, and hallway conversations with municipal officials. You can reach me and anybody else at the League of Municipalities through our website, that's nclm.0rg. You can find a directory of everybody here with a contact form. You can reach anybody you'd like. My name is Ben Brown. Again, nclm.0rg. I wanna hear from you. It might lead to an episode on municipal equation. The league has been around since nineteen o eight. We're based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and We represent municipal governments throughout the state, more than 540 of them, n c l m dot o r g. Thank you for being with us. We will see you on the next one.