Two managers in the Snohomish County clerk’s office and the county treasurer will go against each other in the Aug. 21 primary seeking the job as top clerk.
The two candidates who earn the most votes will move on to the general election in November.
Chief deputy clerk Ron Ledford and 22-year office veteran Sonya Kraski are the insiders. Treasurer Bob Dantini wants to move across the county campus and become the new clerk.
Twelve-year clerk Pam Daniels will be forced out of a job by term limits.
The clerk is charged with overseeing the Superior Court’s records. The office is the hub agency connecting lawyers and the public to the justice system.
It has nearly 90 employees and a budget of about $6.7 million.
Whoever replaces Daniels will be confronted with a severe morale problem among the rank and file in the office.
The deputy clerks chose to drop out of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union and form their own association 21/2 years ago.
Since then, the clerks have not been able to negotiate a contract with the Snohomish County executive. That has left the deputy clerks with wages frozen at the 2004 level. They also pay higher medical benefit premiums than other county workers.
In the meantime, other county workers have received cost-of-living pay increases.
The result has been a high turnover rate and difficulty finding quality replacements in the office. The county clerk doesn’t have a direct hand in the dispute between the deputies and the executive, but ending the morale problem is a top priority of all three candidates.
Bob Dantini
“It’s No. 1 on my radar,” Dantini said.
He said his relationship with the executive, the council, other county officials and organized labor put him in a good position to help end the labor dispute.
The turnover rate is too high and morale is down, but the deputy clerks “show up to work every day to keep the office running, and that’s a credit to them,” Dantini said.
Dantini served 12 years as county treasurer. Term limits also force him to leave that post.
He’s running because it is an open seat and the office is “a department in need of strong leadership,” he said.
A certified public accountant, he worked in the private and public sectors before running for the treasurer’s job 12 years ago. Dantini was an internal auditor for the county prior to that.
“I think I provide a very unique skill set, and you can even look at it as a positive that I come from the outside,” Dantini said.
He considers himself a “change agent,” looking for ways to do things more efficiently to save money.
Dantini claims credit for numerous changes in the treasurer’s office, such as getting property tax payments to the bank more quickly to increase earned interest for the county.
In 1998, Dantini ran into a political and personal buzz saw when his former fiance accused him of domestic assault and of possessing cocaine. The state attorney general’s office investigated, and no charges were filed.
However, the treasurer said it “was an extremely humiliating experience to go through. It was a character builder.”
Sonya Kraski
She started as a file clerk and worked her way up through the ranks to management level. She now is manager of the domestic violence and family law facilitator section.
Kraski knows very well that the morale problem and turnover are affecting the office and the workers.
“I’ve risen from the ranks and I have a different type of relationship with the staff,” Kraski said. “I’ve walked in their shoes.”
She said she’s in a good position to work for a compromise solution, partly because she has a good working relationship with office staff and many others throughout county government.
“My style is I always like to find a solution to things. There’s always a solution, a compromise,” Kraski said.
She’s running for the office because she believes strongly in the role of the justice system in society and she knows about the clerk’s essential role in providing justice.”I want to make sure the clerk’s office operates in the most efficient and effective manner possible,” Kraski said.
A political unknown herself, Kraski’s mission now is to get her name and qualifications in front of the voters. While she hasn’t prepared and managed a budget for the whole office, Kraski said as a manager she’s been involved in the budget process.
She’s the daughter-in-law of former Arlington Mayor Bob Kraski, but she doesn’t know if that will help her election cause or not.
“That will depend on whether people who remember him liked him or not,” Kraski said. “But I’m running on my qualifications and experience.”
Ron Ledford
Chief deputy clerk Ledford is not a stranger to elections.
He’s the former elected clerk of Saline County, Ill., defeating an incumbent clerk in 1980. After that, he was a court administrator in Austin, Texas, before Daniels hired him to be her chief deputy seven years ago.
The morale problem is something “that needs to end and it needs to end quickly,” Ledford said. “I will work on that problem every day until it is resolved.”
Running the day-to-day functions of the office, Ledford has seen good workers walk out the door because of the wage crunch. “It’s had a chilling impact on our ability to recruit employees,” he said.
As the top deputy, Ledford’s job has been to run the office as well as taking Daniels’ ideas and putting them into practice.
One of those ideas was an aggressive program collecting fines and restitution payments that has resulted in a 30 percent increase in a year.”Now they know someone’s going to make them pay,” Ledford said.
He would likely be out of a job if another candidate wins the election, and he accepts that as a reality of the political world. He said he’s running because he has a passion for the job.
“I realize this is what Ron Ledford is. I am a professional court manager. I still enjoy it,” he said. “I still find value and enjoy what I do.”
Besides, Ledford said, his experience and skills would best serve the residents of Snohomish County.
Of Dantini, Ledford said the treasurer has executive experience but no technical knowledge of how the county clerk’s office runs.
Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or haley@heraldnet.com.
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