New Carbon clerk details backlog

Carbon County’s new clerk of courts says her office is chipping away at the extreme backlog of cases left by her predecessor, but the office is still about six months to a year away from being completely caught up.

On Thursday, Clerk of Courts Francine Heaney reported to the county commissioners about the state of the office since she took over on Oct. 22.

Heaney said office workers are working diligently to get through the cases that haven’t been filed, some dating as far back as 2016, and have made progress, but there is more to do.

On Dec. 14, she and first deputy Karen Sweeney went to Lehigh County, which is contracted with Carbon to help process some of the backlog with assessing costs and fines.

“We got a broad overview of doing assessments of costs and fines and we’re starting to take that back,” Heaney said, adding that beginning in 2019, her office will begin the process of bringing assessing costs and fines back from Lehigh. “We’re going to wean ourselves off Lehigh County. We want to make sure we don’t have any major mistakes going forward.”

Through this process, the clerk of courts office will work on transferring the 80 probation cases, some of which haven’t been pulled in since Jan. 1, 2017.

Each case is assessed $50 a month for probation, and probation lengths could be anywhere from one to three years, Heaney said.

“That’s a lot of money we haven’t been getting in,” she said, adding that the county will now be able to recoup some of the fees.

The office has issued over 300 warrants between Oct. 22 and Thursday in cases that had been backlogged. She said that prior to her taking the office, the clerk only issued 108 for the first part of 2018.

Her office also filed approximately 150 judgments that had been completed but not signed by the former acting clerk of courts.

“They were prepared, but just not signed by the acting clerk and I don’t have an answer for why that was,” Heaney said. Each judgment carries a fee of about $53 due to the office.

Heaney has also filled some of the vacant positions in the office and said one full-time and one part-time position will be posted for the new year.

Looking forward, Heaney said that the office is going to start scanning cases into electronic files to allow other counties easier access to them.

Heaney was confirmed as the new clerk of courts by Gov. Tom Wolf and the Senate in October and was sworn in by Senior District Judge Edward Lewis.

She replaced former Clerk of Courts William McGinley, who retired abruptly after 28 years in the position on May 1 and has since been charged by the state Attorney General’s office with taking nearly $45,000 in bail money and prison booking/fingerprint fees.

In July, the county commissioners aired their frustrations with how the office was being handled, calling it “a mess.”

That same month, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office began an investigation into McGinley and the office’s operations and the county’s insurance carrier, the Pennsylvania Counties Risk Pool, conducted an audit of the office.