Superior Court clerk touts improvements, hopes for continuity

Shasta Thomas Glover remembers the issues she and the late Muscogee Superior Court Clerk Ann Hardman encountered when Hardman took office Jan. 3, 2017, and brought Glover out of retirement to be her chief lieutenant.

“When we got there the morale was very low,” she recalled, and the customers weren’t happy, either. “People were complaining they could not get what they needed, or the attitudes of the workers were somewhat negative.”

Visitors paying fees or buying copies of documents encountered another inconvience: They couldn’t use credit or bank cards. Each transaction was cash only.

“They would have to go down to the ATM machine, and that was a headache,” Glover recalled. The cash machine is on the Government Center’s ground floor; the clerk’s office two floors up.

Some employees didn’t have basic supplies: “When we got there, some of the people didn’t even have ink pens. They were buying them themselves.”

Some workers feared for their safety: “We also installed a lot of panic buttons for security reasons. We have court in the same building, and a lot of times people are upset when they come from court, but they have to come to our office to get different kinds of paperwork, and they’re upset.”

And some feared for their jobs, thinking the newly elected clerk would clean house and bring in her own crew. But Hardman and Glover took the approach that the office’s longtime workers knew their jobs; they just needed leadership.

“They needed someone with good management skills,” Glover said. “These people have been there 20, 30 years, so they know their job. They needed someone to help build their morale.”

They needed updated equipment, too, so the department invested in laptop computers, which paid off June 17 when the Government Center tower flooded and the clerks temporarily had to move to the east wing off Second Avenue: “All they had to do was pick up their laptops, and we moved them to the east wing, and we did not miss a beat,” Glover said.

Now 62, Glover retired in 2013 as director of the Aaron Cohn Youth Detention Center, before Hardman three years later asked her to come back to work, to help manage the clerk’s office: “I promised her that I would be there with her every step of the way, and we would make sure that what her vision was, as well as my vision, we would fulfill that vision.”

But after defeating incumbent clerk Linda Pierce in 2016, Hardman did not serve long: She died this past March 19, and Glover was sworn in as her replacement that same day.

Now she is running to keep the position, facing prosecutor Danielle Forte in a special election Nov. 6.

Glover said she hopes to maintain some continuity and stability in the office that has faced so many changes in so short a time.

“The atmosphere is different. The trust factor is different. Customer service is different. … We have torn down a lot of barriers in the office, but I think the main challenge is just perfecting what we have already put in place,” she said. “Why would we change what we already have, when I have built trust with those people, as well as them building trust with me?”

Her decades of experience in government gave her the foundation she needed for the job, she said.

She grew up in south Columbus, the child of a single parent, graduated in 1974 from Spencer High School and attended Fort Valley State Community College for four years before she had to come home to help her mother care for a grandfather dying of cancer.

She soon applied at the Columbus Police Department, but wasn’t hired right away. She worked two years in a textile mill before the department called back in 1983, and she became a patrol officer.

In about three years, she got promoted to the motor squad, where officers specialize in accident investigation, and ride Harley Davidson motorcycles.

“I did not know how to ride a motorcycle,” she recalled. But then-Chief Jim Wetherington told her she could learn: “He told me if I wanted the job, he would make sure that somebody taught me how to ride, and that’s exactly what he did.”

She went from motor squad to crime prevention and community relations, then was promoted to detective to youth services and sex crimes. Along the way she earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Troy University.

In 1994 she resigned to become a juvenile intake officer working under then-Juvenile Court Judge Aaron Cohn, and in 1997 became a juvenile detention counselor.

She was promoted to assistant director of the Aaron Cohn Regional Youth Detention Center in 2004, and became director in 2011, overseeing more than 80 detained youths and a workforce of over 60 officers and 30 civilian workers.

Now she’s managing the clerk’s office that serves seven Superior Court judges and keeps State Court records as well, handling adoptions, divorces, DUI cases, temporary protective orders, real estate records, documents related to civil and criminal cases, and much of the revenue such matters generate: “We collect a lot of money on our floor,” she said.

Her background prepared her for the job she now wants to keep, she said: “What I have done in the past, it taught me and it built my confidence in knowing how to lead, how to manage, how to build morale – and also the other thing, is the customer service, the internal part: If you’ve got your employees where they have positive attitudes, it will bleed over externally, and that is what we have done.”

This story was originally published July 27, 2018 at 6:09 PM.