Officials see Clerk of Courts Office as leaner on staff, not on quality

When Lancaster County Clerk of Courts Nicky Woods (R) took office in January 2024, her department comprised 21 employee positions. It now has sixteen.

A staff analysis determined that reduction has led to a $193,000 annual savings for the county. Meanwhile, the agency’s performance has, by some accounts, only improved.

The Clerk of Courts Office manages case filing and processing for criminal and juvenile cases adjudicated by the Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas. (Civil cases are handled separately by the Prothonotary’s Office.) The department also oversees related duties including court fee assessment and private detective licensing. 

Two years ago, several of the office’s positions were vacant and four employees worked remotely, causing what Woods termed “operational inefficiencies” at an office where hands-on clerical tasks were paramount. By the end of her first month in office, Woods required the four remote staffers back to in-office work. Woods recalled that none complied and two applied for unemployment compensation.

“You had four remote full-timers and then you had like two or three clerks upstairs, so nobody was ever in the office,” Woods said. “It was crazy.”

Despite what she characterized as departmental disarray and “union constraints on pay flexibility,” she said, she undertook strenuous efforts to keep the agency fully staffed. Examining each office role, she determined the office could continue operations with fewer employees at no detriment to its work product.

“I not only stabilized a disorganized office but also streamlined operations to deliver better service at lower cost to Lancaster County taxpayers,” she told The Independence. “It was a mess when I went in and it’s cleaned up now.”

Woods, a businesswoman and former police officer, recruited key employees from Dauphin County in the wake of that jurisdiction’s chaotic and short-lived clerkship of Bridget Whitley (D).

“When she came in, she was able to hire very experienced personnel…, and that’s just made a huge difference, as well as Nicky’s own commitment to the office and making sure it’s running smoothly,” District Attorney Heather Adams (R) told The Independence. “All of our interactions have been very positive.” 

The clerk also implemented cross-training to educate staffers on varied duties (e.g. filing, billing, case disposition entry), something she said did not take place in an office where intra-agency communication was discouraged. 

“We realized that there was no flow to the office and nobody knew how to do anything more than one job within the office; it was so strange,” she said. “Once we had that good flow and people were cross-trained on several different things, that’s when we started getting to the point where we don’t need to hire for those vacant, remote positions.” 

In her two years on the job, Woods has also overseen several administrative changes, including enabling credit card payments for filings and record expungements to improve public access, no longer requiring a check or cash; ditching the practice of keeping bail payment records on handwritten index cards, instead utilizing the commonwealth’s more accurate and viewable Common Pleas Case Management System (CPCMS); and facilitating the scanning and digitization of what she determined to be 8.4 million physical pages of records, allowing the courthouse to clear copious archives.

Some prominent county officials take an approving view of Woods’s work so far.

“[Her agency] definitely seems more efficient and certainly, from an operational and cost perspective, Nicky’s been able to ensure that the work is getting done with a smaller staff size and been able to return some money back to the budget,” County Commissioner Ray D’Agostino (R) said. “And I hear from the court’s side that records are being maintained well and that things are running pretty smooth. So, from all that I’m hearing and seeing, it’s positive.”

Lancaster County President Judge Leonard G. Brown III, who assumed the helm of the common pleas bench a year ago, one year into Woods’s term, said her work has only had positive administrative results from his vantage point. 

One of his first interactions with her concerned a review of nearly 100 state-level sentencing documents her team was tasked with conducting to ensure they contained no technical or clerical deficiencies. He asked if she could complete the project for him in two weeks and she did so in just a few days. Subsequent coordination between the court and the clerk’s office has likewise been smooth.

“I think it’s been great,” he said of the department. “The [clerk’s] deputy comes up to meet with me if there’s an issue. Nicky Woods herself will come up and meet with me if there’s an issue. We’ve had no problem working through any challenges, and they’re usually administrative-type things.” 

The judge, who has been a county jurist since 2012, emphasized that, while he has only presided over the full court system with Woods as clerk, he enjoyed productive relationships with her recent predecessors, including Mary Anater, a Republican who Woods defeated in a special primary election in May 2023. 

“I didn’t have complaints about any of the clerks of courts that we’ve had,” he said.

Anater too remembered having to take on a massive accumulation of paperwork that needed to be digitized after an extended period of interim leadership. (The previous elected clerk Jackie Pfursich left the position to become county solicitor in 2021.) Anater, who now works in government relations in Harrisburg, furthermore remembered getting saddled with lingering challenges created by Covid as well as low staff salaries she could not directly control. 

She also recalled billing tasks were behind “by months” and the office was only 68 percent compliant with the entry of sentencing guidelines into a state database. Eighty percent compliance, she said, is required to guarantee a steady flow of state funding and she achieved a rate of well above 90 percent compliance by the end of her term. She also noted that court officials picked her chief of staff as employee of the year in 2023.

“I inherited a paperwork mess, so that was no small feat of getting all the files caught up while paperwork’s coming down and cases [were] still moving along…,” Anater recollected. “I had to think outside the box and do what I needed to do to get rid of the backlog, and that’s what I did. She didn’t inherit any backlog, and when I left the office was humming, so any tweaks she could make to that would be great.”

Anater said that, while she thinks perspective is needed to judge Woods’s performance, she isn’t necessarily opposed to the downsizing her successor has effected.

“Of course, if you can downsize, that’s great,” Anater opined. “Obviously, we weren’t in that situation, given the mess we were cleaning up. When you’re digging out, it’s all hands on deck, and you’re certainly not going to say, ‘Oh, we need less now.’” 

Bradley Vasoli is the senior editor of The Independence.