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Two directors leave clerk's office

The flap over thousands of unprocessed tickets played a part in the departures of the veteran employees.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published January 25, 2005

TAMPA - Two longtime employees of the Hillsborough clerk's office are leaving in the wake of a foul-up that left thousands of traffic citations out of date.

Court operations director Linda Stanley and traffic department director Rebecca Piskura, who have each worked at the office for 28 years, have given notice they will leave, Hillsborough clerk Pat Frank said Monday.

"It wasn't a "You did this and you have to go,"' situation, Frank said. "It was just a general feeling of this isn't a good match with us."

Last week, Frank said that thousands of traffic cases were out of date, some from as far back as December 2003 and involving offenses as serious as drunken driving.

The problem occurred because the clerk's office under Frank's predecessor, Richard Ake, failed to fix a stack of error-riddled tickets that the state had returned to the clerk's office.

Frank said the foul-up involved 41,000 errors on 32,000 citations. Frank, who was sworn in as clerk this month, said some had been left under a desk, ignored.

Stanley, 60, who as head of court operations supervised 500 people, including the traffic department, retired and cleaned out her office Monday. She made $136,032 a year. Frank said she was eliminating Stanley's position because its broad responsibilities created "a bottleneck" in the system.

"I did leave the office today because my position was abolished," Stanley said Monday. She declined to comment further.

As head of the traffic department, Piskura, 53, made $82,118 annually. Frank said Piskura offered last Friday to leave, though it was not certain whether she would resign or retire.

"She was the director of the department, so obviously she had responsibility for the operation," Frank said of Piskura. "I don't know that she was the one that looked at the pile and paid no attention to it. I don't know if she was aware of it. But she was in charge of the department."

Piskura could not be reached for comment Monday.

Frank said she was "working very aggressively to assess the traffic department" and had spoken with everyone in the department Monday "not to create a climate of fear but one of openness."

She said she has directed an auditor to examine the department. Toward that end, she has also enlisted four clerk's office employees knowledgeable about traffic operations but not currently in the Tampa traffic department. "It's going to be an across-the-board analysis of how people are utilized in a way that will best serve the public," she said.

Frank said 11 staff members worked overtime during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to correct the out-of-date citations. Frank said that of 32,000 fouled-up citations, all but 1,500 have been fixed. Those 1,500 involved errors on the part of law agencies, and Frank said she is waiting for the agencies to correct them and return them to her.

--Christopher Goffard can be reached at 813 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 25, 2005, 01:17:11]