Karen Heller: Farewell to the 14th century

One down, three row offices to go.

Clerk of Quarter Sessions Vivian T. Miller tendered her resignation Monday after being roundly criticized by everyone and his mother for running a bloated, obsolete, and thoroughly incompetent hackatorium that failed to keep records on $1 billion in forfeited bail.

Naturally, Miller was praised by city leaders. Ecclesiastes was quoted. Miller intoned, "I go in peace, love, and harmony," which isn't easy to do in Philadelphia.

Her resignation comes a year after the financial efficacy of her office was called into question by The Inquirer, the courts, an oversight authority, and watchdog organizations. We can only hope that Mayor Nutter and City Council will condemn the office for good. This would signify progress, even if it comes so long after the problem was revealed.

"The city is in serious financial trouble and needs to look for every penny that can be saved. Now, the city has to take a hard look at the various row offices," said Wadud Ahmad, board member of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA).

Miller first ran for clerk of quarter sessions promising - and I quote from an Inquirer article of May 1991 - to "upgrade accounting and financial-management practices. She also plans to institute professional training and development programs for workers and to upgrade record-keeping procedures," pledges she didn't honor to this day.

The clerk office's resistance to technology, tied as it is to tradition and intransigence, is out of Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener," though the 19th-century reference is entirely too modern.

The office originated in 1682, and became an elected position in 1838. The very premise of quarter sessions dates to 14th-century England, the reign of Edward III, requiring justices of the peace of each county to meet quarterly at Epiphany, Easter, Midsummer, and Michaelmas.

"It's Time with a capital T to have this office abolished and absorbed into the courts," said Lynn Marks, executive director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts. "It's sort of ironic to have such an old-fashioned name when our society is becoming increasingly modern and computerized" - a claim no one has ever made about the clerk's office.

Miller will step down at month's end, replaced by first deputy Robin T. Jones, who is also, as these things tend to happen here, her daughter. Nepotism is discouraged, if not prohibited, in most businesses but apparently mandated in Philadelphia government by the City Charter.

Now Council must move quickly - if it knows how to - and abolish the office. At Miller's resignation, Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell expressed "mixed feelings. We regret it. We in City Council feel that she didn't have what she needed [in funding] to shore up her department."

That Jannie, always looking out for the little guy - and by little guy, I mean city worker and ward leader in her district.

Should the clerk of quarter sessions be abolished, the responsibility will be assumed by the prothonotary, "said to be the oldest continuously held legal office in the Western hemisphere," according to the First Judicial District Web site. The appointed post is now occupied by Joseph H. Evers.

Clerk of quarter sessions, sheriff, register of wills, and the city commissioners (three in all) constitute Philadelphia's four row offices, all jobs that sound as though they require fetching hats. The elimination of these departments would save taxpayers $15 million (PICA's November 2009 report "A History We Can No Longer Afford: Consolidating Philadelphia's Row Offices") or $36 million (Committee of Seventy's March 2009 report "Needless Jobs: Why Six Elected City Positions Should Die").

Either way, their dissolution would save money, reduce inefficiency and patronage, and, as the Committee of Seventy report notes, mark "a major symbolic step in remaking City Hall," a smart move for us all. Allegheny County, which comprises Pittsburgh, abolished row offices in 2005.

Row offices have been around so long, as have the people who occupy them, that no one is quite sure where the term comes from - organizational charts, election ballots, autonomy from the central bureaucracy. To me, row offices conjures images of small people in cozy houses wasting big money.

They're a drag on the system, fiefdoms that have long lost their charm.

Unlike with the clerk of quarter sessions, the abolition of the other offices will require amending the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter or seeking authority from Harrisburg, which will certainly, and unfortunately, require even more arguments and time.