TOM LISI | Staff Writer In her first week in office, Lancaster County Clerk of Courts Nicky Woods wasted no time shaping her new department.
She fired the office’s former deputy on her first day, and on Monday won approval from the county salary board to pay three new employees.
The moves show Woods is not hesitating to make her mark on an office that she said in her campaign last year was badly mismanaged.
But the quick action also appeared to conflict with the county government’s own workplace policies and procedures, and highlighted some of the legal gray areas addressing what local elected officials can and can’t do as supervisors of their employees.
Part of the discrepancy comes from what county officials refer to as “1620 rights,” a provision in the Pennsylvania county code that prevents county officials from impeding row officers’ rights to hire and fire their own personnel.
How far those rights for row officers go in the courts is unclear. The “1620 rights” provision has not really been litigated in court outside of matters related to union contracts, two employment attorneys who spoke to LNP | LancasterOnline said.
Woods cited the 1620 provision in a Jan. 2 termination letter to the deputy clerk of courts, Dimary Serrano, who had been named “courthouse employee of the year” just a few weeks earlier. The letter did not cite any other reason for Serrano’s termination.
Fast hires
Listings for three open positions in the clerk of courts office, including Serrano’s former job, were posted on the county website Jan. 2, Woods’ first official day in office, county officials said Monday.
The labor contract that covers clerical positions in the clerk of courts office requires that positions covered by the contract be posted as open for at least four days, a provision that’s included in the county’s policies regarding new hires.
In her review of the salary requests from Woods, county Human Resources Director Christina Peddigree said the jobs were open for the required four days. The county’s website had shown the listing closed Jan. 4, but Peddigree said that was an error that was quickly corrected.
The county policies and procedures manual also requires officials to interview at least three qualified candidates for a job, unless the job is posted for 14 days or more. In that instance, officials can choose to interview just one or two candidates, if only that number of applicants meet the qualifications of the job.
At a salary board meeting Monday, Woods said she interviewed one candidate for each position. Peddigree confirmed the individuals hired were qualified for the positions.
LNP | LancasterOnline emailed each of the county’s eight row officers (Woods, Prothonotary Andy Spade, District Attorney Heather Adams, Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni, Register of Wills Anne Cooper, Treasurer Amber Martin, Recorder of Deeds Ann Hess, Controller Lisa Colon and Sheriff Chris Leppler) asking them for their thoughts regarding the speed at which Woods filled the three jobs.
Of those, only Colon, Adams and Martin responded.
Adams said in an email that she has posted positions for four days “anticipating that a qualified applicant interested in the position would apply,” though she did not say how many interviews she conducted in those instances.
The district attorney also said she would have taken actions similar to Woods’ given the same situation. “Had I had qualified individuals interested in joining the office prior to me being sworn in, I would have proceeded in a similar manner — posted it for four days and interviewed those applicants and approached the salary board at the earliest point possible.”
In a text message, Martin said she believes the county human resources department “made special exceptions for the new clerk of courts, and only they can detail the reasons why.”
Martin said she has taken efforts to defend her rights under the 1620 provision, but that she has rarely needed to go to the salary board other than when reorganizing her department.
Colon, a member of the salary board who voted to approve Woods’ salary requests, said the turnaround between the jobs being posted and the vote to approve the salaries was unusually fast. But given the county’s recent difficulties with recruiting staff, the board made an effort last year to approve salary board requests faster than in the past, Colon said, by meeting more often.
The county controller, herself an elected row officer, said she’s aware she may have more latitude to hire and fire her own staff under the state’s county code, but follows the county’s policies and procedures anyway. “I think we should try to abide by the rules that the county set in place,” Colon said.
More Local News:
- Lancaster County Coroner to become sole petitioner in public records case
- New Lancaster County clerk of courts fires 'courthouse employee of the year'
The scope of state law
Elected officials are considered independent officers whose ultimate authority comes from voters. The board of commissioners, which oversees county government, has no formal power over row officers, other than having a final say on their annual department budgets.
LNP | LancasterOnline received a copy of Lancaster County’s 136-page policies and procedures manual through a Right-to-Know request in 2022. It lays out protocols for workplace conduct, performance evaluations, business expenses and grievances.
“These policies, procedures, and guidelines apply to all department heads, elected officials, employees, and agencies of Lancaster County government,” the manual’s introduction states.
Two employment attorneys told LNP | LancasterOnline that the authority of “1620 rights” is largely untested. The nature of employment disputes are also very complicated, even more so in the public sector they said.
“From the perspective of an employment lawyer for an employee, the person who works for a row officer has potentially less (legal) protection generally speaking than someone who is, what I would call more garden-variety working for a county under a county department head,” said Andrea Farney, a labor attorney at Triquetra Law in Lancaster.
Local governments are also rarely subject to the civil service protections that career state and federal government employees enjoy, said Michael Foreman, a law professor at Penn State Law.
“To terminate a federal employee, you have merit service protections, you have discrimination protections, you have processes you have to go through,” Foreman said. “At the state government level it's comparable, and I think as you go down and it gets more local you don't have the same protection.”
