With Santa Rosa County Clerk and Comptroller Donald Spencer retiring after 12 years in office, two members of his staff have stepped up seeking to succeed him.
Spencer's chief deputy, Jason English, and 35-year veteran employee Ginger Pace will face off in the Aug. 20 Republican primary with the clerk's job on the line.
An attorney by trade, English worked for 10 years prosecuting cases for the First Judicial Circuit's State Attorneys Office before taking a job five years ago with the Clerk of Court and Comptroller's Office as its general counsel. He has spent the last three years as Spencer's chief deputy clerk.
English, who Spencer has endorsed, said that if he wins he doesn't anticipate making any drastic changes within the Clerk's Office.
"If it's not broke we're not going to fix it, and the Clerk's Office is running very well," he said, promising to continue Spencer's long-standing policy of returning in excess of $1 million to Santa Rosa County each year.
Candidate Q&A:Jason English for Santa Rosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller
Candidate Q&A:Ginger Pace for Santa Rosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller
Pace has been with the Clerk of Court's Office for 35 years and has worked under four elected clerks. She said she is fully versed in the functions and statutory responsibilities of the office and if elected will serve with integrity. She has received endorsem*nts from such dignitaries as state Rep. Joel Rudman and former Clerk of Court Mary Johnson.
"I am running to bring much needed change to the Clerk's Office and make us one of the best in the state," Pace said on her campaign Facebook page.
English said he wants to continue to strive to introduce and implement new technology in the office that will help ease the workload of its 112 employees while also making life easier for the county residents utilizing the services provided by the office.
He said one such time saving device allows clerk customers to access information and services online rather than onsite. A second, which English referred to as BOTS, takes information, reports or charging documents from entities like the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office or Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and generates a ticket for filing. It's doing automatically, he said, what used to take staff members time to complete.
"We're not replacing anybody, just doing what we can to make their lives easier," he said. "Bots does in just a few minutes what it used to take a person 10 or 12 minutes to do."
Primary Election:
The race between English and Pace turned publicly ugly in July when news was leaked that a year earlier Pace had been demoted and her pay cut.
Spencer said Pace had failed in her role as a supervisor to detect and take action against a subordinate, Pace's cousin, who had been running a business hours side hustle wherein she was performing off site weddings and charging $140 to $180 per ceremony.
Pace claims English was infuriated in the summer of 2023 when word got around the Clerk's Office that Pace was considering running to replace Spencer. She said the behavior of the employee in question, Tammy Caylor, never became an issue until after her anticipated candidacy became known.
"When it happened it took me back ... It took me awhile to put the pieces together," Pace said in July. "I've spent 35 years of my life in that office, serving the public and doing my job. He (English) did it just to promote himself. It was their agenda to do this and they did it."
English said as clerk he wants to prioritize employee development, which he differentiates from training. He said for too long the Clerk's Office has leaned on seniority as the key qualification for promotion and he believes, while seniority will still be considered, more focus should be given to traits that better identify leadership potential.
He also wants to see Clerk's Office employees who deal with the public every day receive training in identifying victims of human trafficking or dealing with mental illness.
English said he also intends to keep up Spencer-inspired traditions of reaching out to the community with service projects like Christmas time toy drives or school supply collections and elder support drives.
At a recent political forum English called into question a Pace initiative to curtail the Clerks Office practice of "employee leasing," or bringing in workers employed by a private company, like Landrum, to get job experience at the Clerk's Office.
He said while Pace "has campaigned rather outwardly against the policy of employee leasing," he sees it as beneficial.
"Employee leasing is pretty much an industry standard these days. When someone comes in, you have to train them how to do the job anyway. With the leasing program these workers have 17 weeks to decide whether the job we assign them to is right for them while at the same time the employer is deciding whether the employee is someone they want to hire."
English said Pace herself worked as a employee lease participant for a year after taking retirement. She was working for Landrum for the Clerk's Office while collecting a retirement check.
"It was good enough for her when it worked to her benefit but now it's not something she supports," he said.
On her Facebook page, Pace claims that "customer service, integrity, and accountability ha(ve) hit an all time low since my opponent has taken over as Chief Deputy." At the local forum, English fired back, saying "despite my opponent's 35 years in one department, she never rose above middle management."
Pace has pointed to an April attempted theft of $850,000 of Clerk of Court funds in an Internet hacking event and expressed outrage that "tax dollars were lost and no one held accountable."
The Clerk's Office has actually recovered $629,000 of the $850,000, and English points out it was a vender error, not a Clerk of Court error that led to the email transaction being compromised.
"It was not the clerk's fault, it was the vendor's email that was corrupted," English said. "We have done everything we were supposed to do."
New policies and procedures have been implemented since the attempted theft, English said, and law enforcement officials have identified a person of interest in the theft.
"Since the theft we have looked at some things we can add to add protections to that system of payment," English said. "We have employed Payment Works, a third party vender that vets accounts and and makes sure payments are going to the right place."
