From the Tampa Tribune, January 16, 2005
Richard Ake has one of the best-known names in Hillsborough County. Yet he kept such a low profile during his 20 years as clerk of the court that few people recognize him on the street.
Q. Why does everybody in Hillsborough know your name?
A. See I'm not only clerk of the court; I'm the county recorder too. So if you bought a home recently or refinanced, every legal document that you recorded through the official record came back with my name on top of it.
Q. As you leave office and look back, what's one thing that you didn't get done?
A. Telephone system. I changed it three times, improved it three times, and it got worse every time. The improvements that we made to it were not equal to the increased demand that was made on it. Still isn't.
Q. How has the access of electronic records changed the nature of your department's work?
A. Not nearly as much as it will. It is going to be our ultimate savior. Most of the complaints we get will go away when we truly have electronic filing and we truly have a paperless court system.
Q. Is it different dealing with the judiciary than dealing with the county commission?
A. My primary dealings with the judiciary are with the chief judge and the administrative judges. I don't really deal on a day-to-day basis with the individual judges. ... The commission is a lot different in the sense that I don't interface with the commissioners directly unless they're mad at the administrator. I am a great barometer of when an administrator is about to leave town, because when I become the board's best friend, that means he's got big problems because otherwise they would much rather work through him.
Q. You've been there through upheaval in both the county commission and the judiciary and we've had corruption problems. What was it like from your perspective?
A. Well, I was actually finance director when the commissioners got indicted. I wasn't clerk, but I guess I probably have testified before about as many grand juries as anyone over at the county. ... It was tough, tough ... We knew that these particular commissioners had some problems, but we did not — I did not — know that there was corruption going on.
Integrity is an environmental thing. After we indicted the three commissioners, boy, my job was the easiest job in the courthouse. There wasn't any commissioner who was going to do anything without checking with somebody first. But over time, that erodes, and one of the ways that you can see it erode is the number of people who have access to the same commissioners — what we call "walk in the back hall." ... This is part of the reason that you want a clerk to be independent, and you want the clerk to be a check and balance on your elected bodies.
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