County Commission votes to strip election duties from clerk and recorder’s office
Cascade County Commissioners voted 2-1 to strip the county clerk and recorder of election duties during their Dec. 12 meeting.
Commissioners Joe Briggs and Jim Larson voted to approve the resolution that removed election duties from the clerk’s office, currently held by Sandra Merchant, and places those duties under an election administrator within the commission office.
The change is effective immediately and commissioners will appoint an election administrator while they post the position and hire the position as a county employee.
The position would be similar to other department heads within the county, such as the planning and public works directors who report to the commission.
Commissioners voted after six hours of public comment on the resolution.
Briggs brought the resolution forward during the Dec. 6 work session stating that under state law, the clerk and recorder served as the election administrator unless commissioners appointed someone else to handle those duties.
He said that he had proposed the move before, believing that an elected official should not oversee elections and that there had been a serious of issues and concerns with the elections office over the last two years.
Briggs said he tried again to make the change after Merchant was elected, but before she was sworn in. He said he was unable to get a second commissioner to agree to put the resolution on the agenda until the Dec. 6 work session when Larson said he believed it should go on the agenda.
The 2024 election cycle has “very complex and important elections coming up,” and Briggs said he wanted to take immediate action to stabilize the office and prepare for the upcoming elections.
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He said he spoke with Merchant about the clerk and record’s breadth of duties and she agreed to removing accounting duties from the office but wanted to keep elections.
The series of lawsuits filed against the county this year over elections, the number of citizen complaints and the “very challenging” canvass last month is why he got support to bring the resolution forward now, Briggs said.
Commissioner Rae Grulkowski voted against the resolution, saying of Merchant, that since being elected, “she’s actually reformed the office. I don’t think this county would benefit at all” from removing election duties from Merchant.
Grulkowski said that Briggs and Larson hadn’t helped Merchant be successful and that it’s a bad idea to move elections under the commission office because, “your local government needs some fixing.”
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Grulkowski said that Yellowstone County has a staff election administrator who is paid $111,000.
Bret Rutherford, who served as the Yellowstone County elections administrator from 2005 until October 2022 told The Electric that he didn’t get paid that much and believed it would have been about $91,000 this year. He said the county just hired an attorney to fill the election administrator position, setting a new bar for the rest of the counties.
Grulkowski said that in Cascade County it’s just a $2,000 add-on, but did not mention the clerk’s base pay, which is $75,086.30 in the current budget. Merchant also receives another $3,032 for running a combined office. Her total salary in this year’s budget is $80,118.30.
County commissioners make $77,086.30 in this year’s budget.
For comparison, this year’s budget increased the county attorney’s salary to $148,872.
Grulkowski said that she believes the money for a new staff person would be better spend on a new chief financial officer, a position that has been vacant since February with a pay range of $90,000 to $115,000. The job is still posted on the county website.
Grulkowski said that Merchant ran successful elections and should be given an opportunity to prove herself.
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Larson said that “with all the issues festering in Cascade County at this time” including political paraphernalia and library levy opposition stickers in the elections office this year, he feels it’s time to “get elections office back into a situation that we can all be proud of.”
Grulkowski said that the resolution is flawed because it includes a provision requiring any commissioner on the ballot to refrain from making any election decisions that year.
In 2024, Grulkowski is on the ballot.
She said it would be better to have Merchant recuse herself in years that she is on the ballot.
County Attorney Josh Racki, said that Grulkowski asked his office to provide an opinion on whether Merchant had violated state law. The county attorney is also an elected position.
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Racki said his team reviewed it and that the office’s opinion is that they have no reason to believe that Merchant had “knowingly or willingly violated Montana law that would require us to redo or invalidate an election.”
During public comment, Patrick Coley, a county elections employee, said he doesn’t support the resolution.
He said no one from the previous elections office remained in the office and they had lots of challenges learning the processes and dealt with IPS closing after having mailed ballots for years.
“Was it perfect? No. Was it done according to the law, yes,” Coley said.
There have multiple complaints and lawsuits alleging that the county elections office violated a number of state laws.
A district court judge appointed a monitor for the June 6 library levy election.
Sandra Merchant spoke during the meeting saying that she had asked the commission so remove accounting duties from the clerk’s office since she believed there was a conflict with auditors falling under her office as well.
Commissioners removed accounting duties in January 2023.
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Merchant said she didn’t remember talking to Briggs about election duties except for one time when she made an appointment to meet with him.
She said the effort to remove election duties is “obviously a political and probably personal move.”
Merchant said that the November canvass “was the first time in 15 years that the election canvass was done according to the law.”
Merchant oversaw two other canvasses this year, for the May school election and June library election.
She said that Briggs and Larson let former clerk Rina Moore make mistakes and it was okay.
Elliot Merja, of the Fort Shaw Irrigation District and a plaintiff in one of the election lawsuits against the county said that Racki saying Merchant didn’t do anything illegal was wrong.
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He said he supported removing election duties from the clerk and recorder’s office.
“Elections have consequences every time. It was egregious what they did,” Merja said of the Fort Shaw May 2 election.
Slightly more than half of those speaking during public comment opposed the resolution saying it would nullify their votes, take away the people’s voice, cost more to hire a new administrator, was unethical or immoral and be a form of tyranny by Briggs and Larson.
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Kirby Shepard, a local pastor, said it was tyrannical behavior by the county commission and would cause irreparable harm.
He said it was “concerning haste” in putting the resolution forward.
Shepard was one of several who cited Montana Code Annotated 7-3-158 saying the commission couldn’t change the duties of an elected official until the end of their term.
That section of law only applies if voters opt to change their form of government entirely and when voters have adopted the new plan of government, which is not the case with the resolution before the commission during their Dec. 12 meeting.
State law requires that every 10 years, voters be asked if they want to change their form of government, which is a formal and lengthy process under state law.
Voters in Great Falls and Cascade County will be asked that question in November 2024. In 2014, voters opted to keep their existing forms of government.
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Later in the meeting, Carey Ann Haight, chief deputy county attorney for the civil division, said that the reference to MCA 7-3-158 as it relates to the resolution is “completely wrong and inapplicable.”
Before the vote, Grulkowski said she would prefer to get an Attorney General’s opinion on that statute.
Several state lawmakers, including Jeremy Trebas, George Nikolakakos, Steve and Lola Galloway and Daniel Emrich spoke in opposition to the resolution.
Great Falls Public Schools Superintendent Tom Moore said that the district has struggled to communicate and get information from the county elections office since Merchant took office.
He said the district submitted a list of 16 questions to Merchant and the commissioners in May and haven’t yet received answers.
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Moore said the district spent about $17,000 on legal counsel to navigate their election issues and staff spent hundreds of hours on elections, which was never needed in the past.
Moore said the district doesn’t want to run elections themselves since public officials are paid with tax dollars to run local elections, but “we have some questions and some concerns…about the integrity of elections in Cascade County.”
In September, the district sent a letter to County Commissioners asking that they remove election duties from the clerk’s office.
Paige Turoski, a school board member, said she was consulted about that letter so it wasn’t representative of the school board.
Bill Salina, a former county commissioner, said that when he had served with Briggs, they often disagreed, but, “I never thought you were a tyrant.”
For Merchant’s time in office, it’s been a “failure to thrive,” Salina said.
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He said that she has failed to seek education, support, advice and failed to act in a timely manner.
“When you have failure to thrive that can only go on so long and finally you have to take action,” Salina said.
He said he appreciated the courage to act from Briggs and Larson.
Larson said at the conclusion of public comment that with the calls and emails he’d received, he believed more were in favor of the resolution than opposed.
Briggs thanked all those who offered comments and that, “I do not do this lightly.”
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He said he agreed with much of what those opposed to the resolution said, but “we have a problem that has to be fixed and it has to be fixed in the near term. The problem exists now and I truly believe it has to be fixed now.”
Grulkowski said that “we don’t have enough information to make any decision.”
She said she didn’t think the commission meeting was the proper format to consider the resolution.
“Us three don’t talk and we don’t listen to each other,” she said of the commission. “This is reactionary and not well thought out.”
After adjourning the meeting, Grulkowski asked the commission’s administrative assistant to schedule a meeting as soon as possible to discuss their process to implement the resolution.
In talking to reporters, Briggs said that he had called the county human resources director after the vote to ask him to meet with current elections staff on Dec. 13 to assess whether they’ll be willing to stay in that office.
He said that commissioners will make an interim appointment for the election administrator that could be a county employee but might not be, while they develop and post the job description for the long-term hire.
Briggs said that the position would be a direct report to commissioners and they’d treat that as they have with other recent hires when those interviews aren’t open to the public and even if the commission opted to make those public, he said an applicant would have the ability to assert their right to privacy and close those interviews to the public.
