The Billion-Dollar Baby

The Clerk of Quarter Sessions is gone. Its budget and employees remain.

by Holly Otterbein

[ what change? ]

Last week, Mayor Michael Nutter signed a law that officially shuttered the Clerk of Quarter Sessions (CQS), an anachronistic office that, as you know by now, failed to collect $1 billion of the city's forfeited bail. The law gives CQS' job — issuing bench warrants, taking in bail fees and staffing courtrooms — to the First Judicial District (FJD), in hopes that it will do it more competently and cheaply. Nutter called the moment "one more tangible piece of proof that government can be reformed."

But did ditching CQS change anything?

Ellen Kaplan, the vice president and policy director of Committee of Seventy, isn't so sure. And since her good-government group was perhaps the loudest cheerleader for the office's burial, that's cause for concern. Kaplan testified before City Council last month, "Our goal was not simply to abolish the Clerk's office," but to take "a hard look at [its] various functions with an eye toward adopting efficiencies and lowering costs. We are not confident that this has been done."

Indeed, in 2009, the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority reported that if CQS was shoehorned into FJD, the city could save between $1.4 million and $2.4 million a year. But, as Kaplan points out, there are "no outright cost savings" from the abolishment; this week, Council is set to approve a bill to transfer CQS' $4.5 million budget for this fiscal year into FJD's coffers. Additionally, the city has not eliminated any jobs during the move: The CQS had 104 employees; the number of clerks now in FJD is 106.

Pamela Dembe, president judge of the Court of Common Pleas, says FJD "is really just hiring to fill vacancies in the existing structure. ... Each courtroom needs a clerk, which wasn't happening."

Perhaps. It's entirely possible that FJD requires just as much cash and manpower to do the job right as CQS needed to botch it. But, says Kaplan, what's disconcerting is that "they didn't take a look at these functions and ask if we can do them at a lower cost before the move. They just had this knee-jerk reaction: Of course all the employees have to stay, and of course all the money has to stay. Maybe they just didn't want to tell people that they'd lose their jobs."

During the bill's September hearing, Councilman W. Wilson Goode Jr. also wondered "what changes" would take place from the office's elimination, and remarked that "it doesn't sound like a lot of due diligence has been done" to investigate potential savings.

Dembe argues that audits of CQS by Econsult Corp. and Ermst & Young provided such a look, and FJD "incorporated most of their recommendations." However, the Court refused to release the audits to either Committee of Seventy or City Paper. Even Council members have not seen the audits — despite already voting to abolish CQS.

Additionally, an e-mail obtained by City Paper suggests that Dembe never intended to shake up the office. In April, before either the transfer or audit were complete, she wrote to CQS employees: "The FJD is confident that it will eliminate [the Clerk's] problems with the same staff and the same budget that have been available to the outgoing management team for almost 20 years."

It's an odd thing to say to the employees of an office that City Controller Alan Butkovitz scolded for being "poor" at collecting fines, Auditor General Jack Wagner criticized as doing "inadequate," "improper" and "untimely" work, and The Philadelphia Inquirer found had failed to collect $1 billion of forfeited bail.

FJD argues that it won't save the city money by lowering administrative or personnel costs, but by doing its job better. Dembe points out that the staff found an "enormous amount of money ... just sitting in a checking account"; this cash, along with normal court fees, has given the city $8.5 million since FJD took over five months ago. That's 27 percent more money than CQS took in last year.

Still, it's unclear whether FJD will be any better equipped to locate the $1 billion in forfeited bail than the Clerk's office. In 2009, CQS took in $268,000 in forfeited bail; since FJD took over almost half a year ago, it has retrieved $150,000. The "billion-dollar baby," as it's been nicknamed, was perhaps the biggest argument for eliminating CQS in the first place.

Unless the audits are released and prove otherwise, says Kaplan, "The end result of the transfer essentially amounts to moving employees from one office of the Criminal Justice Center to another."

(holly.otterbein@citypaper.net)