We are excited to announce that the Marlene Carlson for Will County Circuit Clerk campaign will be charging full steam ahead seeking victory against a 4 term incumbent in 2012! We are very proud and fortunate to have sailed through the Republican primary election unopposed!!
We will be working tirelessly until the November 2012 general election to enlighten voters about the wasteful spending and mismanagement of this office by the Democrat Pam McGuire.
Putting politics aside and just being practical, Will County needs a NEW Circuit Clerk with a clear vision, successful track record in information technology and systems management to make informed decisions in these areas.
The role of a Circuit Clerk in the 21st Century has dramatically changed. This role is no longer about stamping a few court documents and collecting a few fees on a small scale for the old “mom-and-pop one horse” county. Will County has grown so fast in such a short period of time.
The latest count in foot traffic in 2011 to our courthouse was almost 1 million people! One example of this overload, we have dozens and dozens of people waiting outside our courthouse just about every day to pay traffic tickets!! Is that really necessary? We need to simplify this process electronically and it needed to be done “yesterday!” It’s downright laughable, with everything else in our lives being done electronically, that our Circuit Court system still does practically everything in-person and on paper!!
Our Will County Circuit Clerk's office, under the management of Ms. McGuire for almost 16 years (4 terms), is egregiously riddled with inexperience, wasteful spending, cronyism and nepotism. Although the population of our county has grown substantially, very little has been done to simplify the workload of our 100+ skilled employees. We need to modernize our court system and we need to do this in a cost effective way. Our incumbent Circuit Clerk's solution to modernizing is by hiring expensive consulting firms to do this work. Just about every pet project over the past decade has been farmed out to Information Technology (IT) consulting firms at the expense of the taxpayer.
Have you heard the latest BUZZZZ out of Will County Circuit Clerk's office this past week? There is an RFP (Request for Proposal) out to IT consulting vendors once again to fill the void of leadership experience with the potential reward of $5-9 million contract for a new Case Management System. Looks like my Democratic opponent and her brilliant CIO Enright once again cannot manage their own Information Technology (IT) projects in-house and must "Farm Out" this work at the expense of the taxpayer.
Hopefully our Will County taxpayers won't have to cough up the dough again to fund another "FLOP" project like the last IT consulting firm we've been fitting the bill for, URL Integration out of Colorado!!
So much for folks in OUR local government supporting local in-state jobs. Hasn't Illinois lost enough jobs already? It's a slap in the face for the hard working Will County taxpayer who does everything he/she can to keep their jobs and homes afloat in the state of Illinois only to find these dollars shipped out of state!! Pretty soon they'll be farming our jobs out to the BRIC countries to do our work!! Check out this link to latest RFP for Will County Case Management System; yet another example of the potential for wasteful spending for another flop project at the hands of our Circuit Clerk.
Speaking of "FLOP" projects and millions of dollars wasted. Ever hear of E-Citations program? Has that project ever gotten off the ground? How many millions have we spent on this project???
Sounds clear to me that after 4 terms in office, McGuire and her CIO have run out of ideas, and that hiring expensive consultants at the expense of the taxpayer is their only hope. Why do we elect people to these offices when they have no experience or original thoughts of their own? It is time for positive change in Will County government. I strongly believe that I can provide that positive change. Elect Marlene Carlson for Will County Circuit Clerk 2012! http://www.carlson4circuitclerk.com
So I have some questions: Do you really expect Will County's IT Department to rewrite a case management system in house? Wont you need dedicated project managers, developers, business analysts, quality assurance testers, systems integrators, and an entire support structure of help desk and IT personel? Should county government be in the business of writing its own software instead of finding local vendors to provide pre packaged solutions to save time and money?
By the way, please don't take this as a personal attack. Its not every day I get a direct line to a person running for office in my county. Especially someone that's in the same career field as I am. I plan on asking some tough questions to see if you are worth your salt. But, to be brutally honest, I think your making broad claims like most politicians. My fear is, If you are elected, and you get to see what the actual problems are you may melt down like a certain president of ours when you find you can't fulfill your promises.
What technology would you employ? .net? java? SAP? Fortran? What are your specific plans to develop maintainable code? As others have posted, it's tough to re-invent wheel. If you did forgo the many 3rd party options, would you license out Will Co.'s system? With 100+ counties in Illinois alone, surely others have or shall cross this bridge. I agree, time has long since past for Govt to quit wasting our precious time with antiquated people and systems.
One of the most horrible problems in Will County that is caused by Pamela J. McGuire and other clerks is that they tell non-custodial fathers that call to ask for information about heir own cases to drive in and ask in person, clerks will lie and say that they can't tell the father, they'll even say he's wanted if he isn't. When a father politely insists that the clerks are required by law to answer his questions (assuming they're reasonable and the father isn't being rude), clerks often threaten the father with false arrest and even file false police reports him for making threats that he never made. This is causing tax payers more than anything. This is forcing innocent and loving fathers to know absolutely nothing about their own family ourt cases that they aren't being served notice about, so that the fathers end up with arrest warrants issued for not showing up, excessive "child support" orders, and even a father losing his God given right to see his children. It's all about Title IV-D, Title V-E, VAWA, and other federal grants and it's not only causing more monetary damage than ahything else in this country is, but it's giving fathers no chance to ever stay out of jail or at least homeless shelters, while it's forcing children into being bastards. Would you step up and try to put and end to this?