The Clerk of Court prepares an annual budget in accordance with F.S. 218.35. Per this statute, we prepare two budgets. The first is presented to the BOCC in June of each year for the functions of the finance department, the maintenance department and the recording department. The second is presented to the State in August of each year for the court-related functions of our office. Both are reviewed and approved by these agencies prior to the beginning of fiscal year on October 1.

The Clerk of Court is audited annually by several entities. First, in conjunction with the Board’s annual independent financial audit, our entire office is audited by this same CPA firm. Second, the Department of Financial Services audits our court-related budget for purposes of verifying the appropriateness of our expenditures of court-related revenues. Third, as a part of a State “pass-through” grant from the Federal government, our Child Support department is audited by a separate CPA firm to ensure these grant funds are used in accordance with the grant limitations.

The Office of the Clerk of Court tracks and measures a variety of work loads it performs. The reasons for tracking them are as varied as the work loads tracked. Among other reasons, we record some for audit purposes, some for statutory purposes, some for court purposes, and some for budgeting purposes.

There are two basic categories of work loads: Statistics and Performance Measures. The Statistics are further broken into the departmental categories of: General Administration, Recording, Finance, Civil Court and Criminal Court. Our department heads track these statistics either on a monthly or yearly basis. The first page of each file is a summary page documenting the totals for all the relevant work loads. After the summary page, you will find individual pages for each work load and a corresponding graph. Each year we consider new work load statistics to measure. As you will see from the graphs, there are some new work loads we just started tracking and we don't have much history on them yet.

There are several other work loads that we track that deal with performance measurements in the court related areas of our office. The State mandates that we track our performance and has set the level of performance for us to meet. These measurements are also audited as a part of our annual audits. These measurements focus on our efficiency and timeliness of performing various court related duties.

The Clerk of Court strives to improve its service to the citizenry of Wakulla daily and we use these tools to help meet that objective. Please call us if you have any questions or comments.