Marion County Clerk Steve Fox and County Treasurer Gary Purcell were sworn in Thursday morning to begin next four year terms.
This will be Fox’s fourth term and he has a special project for his new terms, digitizing vital records.
“Birth and death certificates and marriage license. A lot of people don’t realize those are actually hard copy physical records that are kept here forever. And the more we touch them and handle them to issue copies the more they deteriorate and that is something when I came into office I realized how bad of condition they were in.”
Fox says the challenge was raising the necessary funding to complete the project.
“It was money that my office gets in fees that I have the spending authority over to the tune of about $270,000. It has taken me a lot of years to save that up. It’s a huge project that will be great for the constituents and future county clerks that they don’t have to worry about those records ever going away. They will be there perpetually.”
Fox says his office will always be challenged by changes in voting and other state laws.
This will be Purcell’s second term as county treasurer. He wants to improve the property tax bills.
“The tax bill layout looking like payments are more like a check where they are easier to read for scanners, running it through the system and making a file to import into our system.”
Purcell says that is important on the final days before tax bills are due when they are dealing with a high volume of payments.
All members of the county board will be sworn in at a special county board meeting at seven next Monday night at the large courtroom at the courthouse. All 15 members were up for election this year due to redistricting as a result of the 2020 census.
