The Queens County Clerk’s office, nestled on the bottom floor of the magisterial Queens Supreme Courthouse in Jamaica, feels more like a public library than a courtroom.
Long counters lined with computer monitors allow visitors to search the clerk’s archive at their own pace. Some of the cold fluorescent overhead lights have been swapped for warm yellow bulbs. Behind kiosks labeled by the clerk’s various functions, staff members wave a greeting as visitors walk by.
These innovations in visitor comfort are the work of Queens County Clerk Audrey Pheffer, a former Assembly Member and community advocate from South Queens who has led the office since 2011.
“Look, I’m a people person. [I had] 24 years in the Legislature,” said Pheffer. “So I’m anxious to make sure that people feel very comfortable.”
In nearly 14 years of overseeing the county’s central legal filing center, Pheffer has migrated all of the clerk’s historical records up to 1955 to an online system and streamlined the process of jury duty for residents.
But, it’s the constituent services role of the county clerk that means the most to Pheffer.
“I think my motivation, first of all, is to continually allow people access — whether it’s at home or whether they come in,” Pheffer told amNY Law.
Unlike her fellow clerks in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Pheffer never worked as an attorney or judge before taking over the office. She followed her passion for community advocacy to the Legislature, where she held the Rockaway and South Queens Assembly seat for nearly a quarter of a century before taking on her current role.
At 83 years old, Pheffer shows no signs that she is tiring of her role as clerk of the Queens County Supreme Court, which entails keeping records of all Supreme Court cases in the county. She’s also the Commissioner of Jurors, responsible for assembling qualified jurists, and Clerk of the County, which gives her responsibility for all documents that don’t involve litigation, such as new business or religious institution certifications.
Pheffer’s career as a community activist began in the early ‘60s when she got involved in advocating for children with mental disabilities at what was then called the Association for the Help of Retarded Children, now AHRC. She went on to work at the Rockaway Occupational Training Center, where she advocated for education and job placement for clients with special needs before joining the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 1977.
It was during this time that she got her first look at state government. Her work brought her into the orbit of State Senator Jeremy Weinstein, who saw her talent as a community organizer and hired her as an administrative assistant, where she worked for six years.
“His thing was you could do a lot inside, or you could be the person outside fighting. And I found that I can accomplish more internally,” Pheffer said.
She served a brief stint as the Queens liaison for New York City Council President Andrew Stein before her local Queens Assemblymember Gerdi E. Lipschutz resigned in the midst of a corruption scandal, leaving her seat vacant.
Pheffer, then 45, had become a locally-connected Democratic district leader and handily won the seat. During her legislative tenure, she took over as the chair of the Assembly’s Consumer Affairs Committee, where she passed consumer protection bills that “really affected people’s lives.”
Pheffer cited her work on bills to regulate hormones in milk, to stop used car dealers from selling new cars and to mandate the date appearing on magazine subscriptions as examples of her legislative record. “Just a whole bunch of little stuff like that,” she said.
After decades in the Legislature, she threw her hat in the ring for County Clerk after the death of her predecessor, Gloria D’Amico, left the position vacant. She put in her application and got the approval of then-Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver, who held one of the political positions that often sways the selection of the county clerk by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.
“I guess they saw that not only could (I) learn, but also I had the ability to work with people and they felt that was an important attribute in this job,” Pheffer said.
Learning about the miscellaneous functions of the office was something she undertook as she transitioned into the new role. She met with Kings County Clerk Nancy Sunshine and former New York County Clerk Norman Goodman to help her prepare. When she got into her new office, she did a lot of observing. “You go from department to department, and you talk to the people,” she said. “At first, they say, ‘Oh, the boss is coming out of the back room.’ But the way to learn is to watch.”
As she grew into the role, Pheffer realized that she wanted to change the way records were preserved, residents were greeted, and the length of jury duty.
The record room was a “mess,” she said. In reorganizing it, her staff would scan the records into a system that allowed them to access documents, but not the public. During the pandemic, with most of her staff working from laptops at home, Pheffer finally had time to transfer the records file by file into a publicly accessible database.
To help the public search through the online system, she installed public computers and trained staff on how to greet and assist with searches. She also installed machines to aid residents who are hearing or visually impaired.
For jury duty, she instituted a program called “One Day, One Service,” which set a time limit for potential jurors while they were being interviewed during jury selection. Recently, she’s also been attending more civic association visits to encourage jury participation. The night of amNY Law’s interview, she was going to a meeting of the Federation of Laurelton Block Associations to speak on the importance of representing Queens’ diversity through jury selection.
These civic group visits, similar to the kind of drop-ins she would have made as a state legislator, are aligned with the Office of Court Administration’s goal of increased “civic engagement.” The court system recently created a new engagement coordinator position to oversee court system education programs in schools and community groups.
For Pheffer, the social duties of the job have a personal dimension. When asked about her hobbies, she mentioned keeping up with her staff. Walking into her personal office, the decoration has the coziness of a grandmother’s house.
Pheffer’s daughter, Stacey Pheffer Amato, who won her mother’s Assembly seat in 2016 and has held it ever since, has two children. A picture of Pheffer and her daughter labeled “herstory” hangs on her wall, marking the event of a Legislative seat being held by mother and daughter as a historical first for New York. Other family photos, awards, and a red, white, and blue Beanie Baby clutter the top of a glass cabinet that Pheffer has filled with her collection of mugs from all the places she’s traveled.
“Everybody says, ‘Why don’t you retire?’” Pheffer said. “Because I don’t play golf. I don’t play tennis. I enjoy the people here.”
Read More: https://www.amny.com/law/
