Jefferson County’s “fourth commissioner” is giving up her office.
Bonnie Ramey, the county’s longtime clerk and recorder, election administrator, surveyor, and assessor, sent her letter of resignation to the Commission on May 11. She will leave her job on June 30.
“Although I have so enjoyed working for the residents of the county and with all the elected officials, department heads and employees of the county, personal reasons necessitate that I vacate my position and focus on my life away from the office,” she wrote.
Ramey said she had planned to retire at the end of her current term — her ninth — in November, 2022. She was first elected clerk and recorder in 1986, after being appointed to the job the year before.
The Clerk and Recorder’s office is, in many ways, the nerve center of county government. Ramey and her five employees, four of them full-time, preserve the records of Jefferson County: deeds, mining claims, property transfers, subdivisions, surveys, birth and death certificates. They track birth dates and deaths. They note and store all actions of the County Commission.
The election administrator is, technically, a separate job that, in Jefferson County as in many others, has been conjoined with the Clerk and Recorder’s office. Last year, Ramey oversaw the transition of the county’s primaries and November elections to all-mail ballots — reckoning both with a shortage of supplies and the need to adhere to social distancing requirements. She has served on the state’s Election and Technology Advisory Council.
Ramey “knows everything about everything,” said County Commission chair Leonard Wortman, who called her the “fourth commissioner.” “When anybody has a question, we always look to her for the answer. She sets us on the right path.”
The county has posted the job opening. From those applications, the Commission will select Ramey’s successor, who will serve until next year’s general election.
In the meantime, Ramey is ramping up the training of her staff to take on her tasks, if not her 37 years of acquired experience. (Her longtime deputy Leslie Martini retired last month.)
She is working to complete a migration plan for the county’s electronic records, ensuring that they’re accessible, searchable, and retrieveable. She has launched this year’s county budgeting process, a months-long effort that won’t be completed until early September. And she has set in motion the preparations for this November’s elections, a comparatively modest vote focused on municipal offices.
What she probably won’t get to, she says, is the digitization of all the county’s books going back to 1865. They’re currently searchable on microfilm, but the quality of digital reproduction is much higher. “There’s always projects I want to get done,” she said.
