We here at Shift recognize that public employees often have very hard jobs to do, and that the vast majority of these employees are quite competent and committed to serving the public that pays their salary. So, we thank those dedicated public servants.
However, sometimes it seems that there are basic failures in efficiency that must be noted, and for one of Shift’s contributors, a prime example of that arrived on Saturday. That was when he let us know that he’d received a Jury Duty Summons from King County Superior Court.
Often such a notice is not received with overwhelming joy, as jury duty is one of life’s civic duties that can be very disruptive. However, in this case the notice was for his father-in-law – who passed away over two years ago.
Now, when such a death occurs in King County, a death certificate is issued by the County. Don’t even get us started on the rip-off that the county initiates at that time, charging $20 for a “certified copy” of the certificate (which is often required by insurance companies, other government agencies, etc.), the cost of which must be justified by the County for the blue paper the county copies it onto – or maybe because it’s way to grab money from taxpayers when they have no choice in the matter.
No, the outrage here is that somewhere in the county data base it was registered he was gone, but evidently one agency in the county doesn’t have a way to let the court system know that. Is it truly so hard for the county to develop one data base, integrating death certificates with the court system, the elections department, etc.?
We’ve read stories over the years about King County’s inability to fix its computer systems. But because that basic incompetency doesn’t matter to people from King County Executive Dow Constantine on down the line, the court’s Jury Summons made Saturday a little sadder by reminding one family that someone was not there to serve on a jury.
Maybe they could read Facebook updates next time.
Hi ShiftWA team – thank you for the heads up about the unfortunate
jury summons for a deceased family member. What a sad and unexpected reminder
of your loss.
You asked “Is it truly so hard for the county to develop one data
base, integrating death certificates with the court system, the elections
department, etc.”
Actually, yes, that would be a very complicated and expensive
undertaking: although death certificates from King County Vital Statistics and
the courts are both part of King County government, they are separate entities
and systems created over many decades to handle very different processes, for
different organizations. But we looked into the processes that led to this
situation and for what it’s worth, here’s how it likely happened.
To create its list of potential jurors, King County Superior Court
relies on a process that assures a random selection from the entire county.
Names are selected at random from a list generated from several other lists: voter
registrations (handled by King County Elections, a separately-elected agency), and
driver’s licenses and “identicard” records (handled by the State
Department of Licensing).
Every year, the Administrative Office for the Courts in Olympia uses
those sources to create a new list of names for every court in King
County. Until a name is removed from those lists, it could be randomly
selected to be in the pool of potential jurors, and the updating process for
removing names from the lists varies by agency and county.
King County Elections cancels deceased voters’ registrations in
their database when they receive notice from another person (often a family
member returning a ballot for the deceased), or when Elections staff review newspaper
obituaries, or when they receive a list of deceased voters from the Secretary
of State’s (SOS) office, which happens quarterly. The SOS regularly receives
obituary notices from the Washington State Department of Health, which keeps
and maintains the system of birth and death certificates in the state, which
are submitted by Vital Statistics Staff in each county.
You mentioned a $20 fee: that’s charged to comply with a state law
(RCW 70.58) that regulates how the county uses vital statistics information. It
also requires that King County Vital Statistics charge a statutory fee for each
record. Between 50% and 85% of all fees
(that $20) are required by law to be remitted to the state treasurer.
In King County, the Medical Examiner’s Office (which provides
death certificates) and Elections are separate agencies with separate systems.
For Elections in particular, the security of the voter database is of utmost
importance, so to enhance security, the voter database is not networked to other
machines, nor ever connected to either the Internet or an intranet.
Driver’s license and “identicard” records are maintained
by the State Department of Licensing (DOL) and are updated monthly from a list
of reported deaths sent to them by the Washington Department of Health. These
automatically sync with and update the DOL database. If a person moves out of
state and still has a Washington license or ID card when they die, there is a
chance that it won’t be reported or there will be a significant delay in that
being updated in the state’s database.
People often assume there is a giant database of all information
used by all King County government separately-elected offices and all Executive
Branch departments, divisions, and programs. While such a database could be
useful in situations like this, none exists.
When the King County charter was adopted in 1968, the idea of a
single computer system was a foreign concept and remained so as county
government grew and, over time, siloed into related, but separately-run
agencies.
In the 47 years since charter adoption, although technology has
become more affordable and necessary for managing and delivering County
services, technological adoption and funding across the various departments and
agencies has varied significantly.
Integration of the various government systems has not always been
a priority, though that’s changing as our oldest database and case-management
systems age and are being replaced with more affordable, more secure systems
that are easier to connect.
That’s been made possible as the cost of data storage (often in
the cloud now) dropped and has become more secure, and as the cost and
functionality has improved in the tools needed to move and integrate data from
different databases and mainframe computers into cloud-based versions.
The big driver of the change though was when County Executive Dow
Constantine took office and made improving processes to better serve residents
a higher priority. In fact, King County was named one
of the nation’s “Top 10 Digital Counties in 2015 by the Center for Digital Government
and the National Association of Counties. Here are some of our other digital
initiatives aimed at saving tax dollars and improving services for residents: http://www.kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/initiatives/digital-government.aspx
As for your suggestion of reading Facebook updates on residents for
information to use in service delivery: I’m all for helping our customers with
better-integrated systems and selective data-sharing with privacy protections.
But for a government agency, that would be kind of creepy – something we try to
avoid.
I hope this clarifies the processes involved. I’m happy to
investigate your particular situation but would need more information about
your father-in-law (name, date of birth, last known address) to do the
sleuthing offline. Please let me know if I can provide any additional
information.
Natasha Jones
Director of Customer Service
Office of King County Executive Dow Constantine
[email protected]
206-263-9623
http://www.kingcounty.gov/CustomerService