LITTLE ROCK — Pulaski County courthousegoers can expect a new experience today after clerks worked through the weekend reorganizing key offices inside the 120-year-old edifice.
All court files - probate, civil, criminal and domestic relations - will be found in oneoffice, instead of spread out among three. New filings, such as divorces, lawsuits and criminal pleadings, will be gathered in a second office, while the child support office will expand to an accounting office to collect all fines and court payments, combining what had been two offices.
"We'll be ready to go at 8:30a.m. Monday," said Circuit-County Clerk Pat O'Brien, who is halfway through his second term. "There is going to be one place to file all of your documents. Every kind of case file we have will be in one location."
Suite 103, at the courthouse's Spring Street entrance, is now the central filing office, combining two rooms to hold the records for review by researchers. With its rows of shelved court files, computer terminals and desks, O'Brien said, the room will more resemble a library and replace the courthouse's tiny file room where researchers were regularly forced to sit shoulder to shoulder to use the computer terminals.
The clerks office processesabout 30,000 new cases every year, and now those filings will go to the central receiving office in suite 120, at the courthouse's Markham Street office, and the former site of domestic relations.
Court fines and fees will all be collected through the expanded child support office insuite 122 behind the elevators. A complete list of changes can be found on the clerk's Web site at www.pulaskiclerk.com/Re-Org.html.
Another major addition is a room set aside in the new central receiving office for applicants for orders of protection, O'Brien said. Applicants are victims of domestic violence who believe they are in immediate danger from an abuser and are seeking a judge's order to keep that person away from them. O'Brien said he has long recognized the need for a quiet place for them to fill out the necessary paperwork. Since many applicants have children, the room has been filled with donated toys and games, mostly from his employees.
"We were able to reconfigure some space and create special room for people doing orders of protection, and it's very kidfriendly," he said. "That way they can be in a place they are not subjected to the hustle and bustle of attorneys and researchers."
O'Brien said the reorganization is aimed at reducing the workflow for his clerks while making a visit to the courthouse easier on the public. His office might be best known for voter registration and real-estate records, but half of his 96-employee workforce works to support the county's 17 circuit courts.
"The primary reason is it sets the stage for us to make this a 21st-century courthouse," O'Brien said, predicting the courts will be able to accept electronic filing within the next few years. "OurNo. 1 priority driving the reorganization is to better serve our customers, the general public."
The reorganization comes on the heels of renovations in the second-floor real-estate records office, which has added new technology for electronic filing of property records, he said.
Updating the first-floor office space has been in the planning stage for about a year, O'Brien said. A major issue to overcome was adapting the new office plan to the 19th-century courthouse layout. A recognized landmark, clerks have to carefully work around its historical fixtures and features to reconfigure the office space, he said. That included the removal of some counters, which were not considered historically significant, and some rewiring to accommodate more computers.
"The courthouse is not technology friendly, nor is the space evenly distributed considering the growth that has occurred over the last 100 years," he said. "We didn't do anything too radical."
Arkansas, Pages 7, 11 on 10/29/2007