On a weekday afternoon two weeks ago, St. Lucie County Clerk of Courts Joe Smith walked into his office and began to write yet another e-mail to his staff.

It was the news they all knew was coming, but Smith wrote it with dread anyway.

“This week has been one of the most challenging I have faced in my career, and the news I have to share with you is grim,” he wrote.

He then used the word uttered in board rooms and offices across the nation: layoffs.

By the end of the day, Smith - a former St. Lucie County commissioner who has been in the county clerk’s job seven months - said he’d had to lay off eight people. Nine others had taken voluntary buyouts, and he had eliminated another five open positions within his office, all to make up a $546,000 cut in funding to his office.

The cuts eliminated about 10 percent of the work force for the clerk’s office in St. Lucie County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the country whose overall economy has suffered severely because of the housing crisis.

But these cuts were not directly symptomatic of St. Lucie County’s housing troubles, Smith is quick to point out.

Florida lawmakers in the last legislative session, looking to save statewide, decided to change the way clerks of court offices are funded.

The move forced many clerks’ offices to make cuts and started a political battle between the clerks and top judges in judicial circuits, who told lawmakers that the clerks could better afford to work with less than their own offices.

In Palm Beach County, Clerk and Comptroller Sharon Bock had to cut 66 employees to make up a 17 percent cut to her office’s funding, though about half left voluntarily.

The clerk’s Royal Palm Beach office closed a little more than a week ago. The five employees there were reassigned to other departments.

In March, Martin County Clerk Marsha Ewing laid off nine of her employees to make up a projected $400,000 funding shortfall.

Back then, Smith sent an e-mail to his employees warning there was a big chance that he would have to make similar cuts.

Last week, Smith closed the clerk’s recording office in southern St. Lucie County, an office he said was bringing in a lot of revenue during the housing boom.

Smith said he had officials with Workforce Solutions meet with the workers who were laid off to help in their job searches.

Smith said among the things he regretted most was having to lay off an employee who had worked for the clerk’s office for more than 20 years.

“This was not like a ‘We don’t like you, we don’t appreciate you’ thing,” Smith said.

“This was because of financial reasons,” he said. “We had money to pay for them two weeks ago, but it was given to someone else.”

In Smith’s office, staffing levels are now back to where they were in 2003, before the height of the housing boom.

His employees are having to work harder, he says, to get things done in the same amount of time.

Also gone now, Smith said, is the sense of security government employees enjoyed in his parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

Smith, like other clerks, has been critical of the state lawmakers’ decisions that resulted in the cuts, calling it a knee-jerk reaction to the faltering economy.

In his June 19 e-mail to the 189 employees left in his office, Smith said the one bright spot in making the cuts was that “barring additional challenges from the Florida Legislature, we will be able to move forward as an organization without additional reductions in our work force.”

But now Smith admits he fears even that could change by next year.

“Every March, when Tallahassee comes to life, no one’s safe,” he said.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Economy, St. Lucie County. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.