S4E5: Fridays are for Weddings with Catherine McMullen in Clackamas County, Oregon

In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Catherine McMullen. She’s the Clerk in Clackamas County, Oregon. Her office is “the keeper of all county public records,” which means in addition to administering elections, the office also officiates weddings, handles property records and has to be notified in the case of missing property that the finder wants to keep.

They spoke about these unique responsibilities, as well as how the Clackamas County Clerk’s office finds balance – and funding – for all of their numerous duties.

High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson

Transcription of the episode is as follows:

Catherine McMullen: For me, officiating a wedding has been really joyful. It wasn’t something that I ran for office centrally to do, but it was something that was important to me, and I didn’t realize how much joy would bring to my week. And so, every Friday, I get to end the week with something happy, and I always like to tell folks that weddings are great because, unlike elections, there are no losers, only winners, and everyone in the room is happy after they’ve been married, and they go on their way.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]

Brianna Lennon: Welcome back to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. This is Brianna Lennon. I am the county clerk for Boone County and one of the hosts, and with me is my co-host – 

Eric Fey: Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri.

Brianna Lennon: And today we’re really excited to have Catherine McMullen, and if you want to introduce yourself and what your job title is.

Catherine McMullen: Hi all. My name is Catherine McMullen, and I’m the County Clerk in Clackamas County, Oregon. 

Brianna Lennon: And we’re going to talk about some elections administration, but also how it dovetails into some other offices of county clerk, and some things that Eric’s office and my office don’t do. So, it’ll be really interesting to talk about all those different mechanics, but first we’ll ask the question that we start off the show with, which is: Catherine, how did you get involved in elections?

Catherine McMullen: So, I’ve been in public service, gosh, for more than 20 years, but I came to it from public libraries and working with the community – doing outreach, helping people be their most successful selves. So, in the library, I helped people find information they need to succeed, and as an elections administrator and county clerk, I help people vote and have a voice in local government. And so really, democracy and libraries and books and ballots all go hand in hand. So, it wasn’t something I wanted to be when I grew up, but it’s something that I love doing now.

Brianna Lennon: Can you talk a little bit about Clackamas County, some of the demographics and just kind of resource needs and things, and before we started recording, you were talking about how part of Portland, a small section of Portland is also within your county – so any of the parts of Clackamas that make it, you know, unique and interesting.

Catherine McMullen: Yeah, of course. So, Clackamas County is part of the Portland metro area. We have 16 incorporated cities and more than 100 special districts in our county. It is the largest county in the state of Oregon with an elected county clerk in terms of population. And we like to say that “we’re urban, suburban, rural and wild” because we do have 650 voters that are in the City of Portland, but we go all the way up to Mount Hood. So, very diverse communities, people from all different walks of life, and I see that in the clerk’s office whenever we help them with voting, getting a marriage license, officiating a wedding, getting a passport, even recording real property transactions.

Eric Fey: So, real quick. Sorry, real quick. Catherine, can you – that’s a tongue twister – can you expound a little bit on what the duties of a county clerk are in Oregon? Specifically, your duties? I know it’s more than just elections.

Catherine McMullen: Yeah, so the county clerk position in the constitutional office. It actually has existed longer than Oregon has been a state. Whenever Oregon was first formed, Clackamas was one of four districts, and they decided at the local level that a district needed a treasurer to keep the money, a sheriff to keep the peace and a clerk to keep the public record. And so, this position has existed for as long as there’s been the state of Oregon and in Clackamas County – because it’s a constitutional office – we do things by statute. When someone asks me what my job description is, I say it’s the ORS, it’s the Oregon Revised Statutes.

So, I conduct elections. We run our recording office, which is real property records. So, if you buy or sell your home, and then issue marriage licenses, officiate weddings, and then records management is keeping our public record for the county, but also a passport acceptance facility for the federal government. I feel like I learn what my job is – there’s something new every day almost.

I learned about a year into my job that one of the duties of a county clerk is: if someone finds a thing of value or money, $250 or more, they’re required to notify the county clerk and then put something in the paper, and after a certain number of days, they can then keep that item. So, I found that out when someone emailed me and said, “I found a jogging stroller that’s really expensive, but I’d like to keep it,” so I had to look to the ORS and understand why they were reaching out to their county clerk when they found that jogging stroller.

Brianna Lennon: I don’t think I’ve ever heard that as part of somebody’s job description before. That sounds fascinating.

So, one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you specifically is not every county clerk’s office – including in Missouri – is the office that does marriage licenses or conducts marriages, and I feel like that is a very relevant topic, considering conversations about the SAVE Act and different things like that, but, just generally, when people are thinking about the documentation they need to show for voter registration, even currently, I feel like there’s a lot of overlap. What is the process and kind of way that you’ve integrated both of those things together? Like, how do they work together in your office? Or do you keep them completely separate?

Catherine McMullen: Yeah, so we share a public lobby – the recording division and the elections division, and so, whenever you walk into the lobby, you go to the left, if you’re getting married, and you go to the right, if you need to get your ballot. What’s interesting is that all marriage licenses are done through the recording division of the counties in Oregon, but then there’s a limited number of people that are also allowed to solemnize marriages or be a wedding officiant.

So, we have an Oregon revised statute, which is 106.120 that says marriages may be solemnized by a county clerk. It doesn’t say that county clerks have to officiate weddings, and so, not all county clerks do because of all of our other duties. Many county clerks are no longer able to officiate weddings, but when I was elected, I made a point in June of that year to start officiating weddings again in Clackamas County.

In Oregon, same-sex marriage became legal in 2014 and, at that time, the former clerk stopped officiating weddings, and so, here had been a nine year gap from when marriage equality was achieved in Oregon to when I began officiating weddings in June of 2023. It’s really important to me that we recognize the legal right to marry for everyone here in Oregon, and I think it’s important, even if we’re not the first to move towards equity and equality, it’s even important to be one of the last. So, I started, in June of 2023, doing same sex marriages, officiating weddings for all couples that seek this service was really important, and I’ve now been doing it for two and a half years, and married more than 250 couples at this point.

Brianna Lennon: What was the response like when you decided – I mean, because that’s a long gap to not have a government service being offered, what was, how did you kind of reintroduce that back into the community?

Catherine McMullen: Yeah. So, we did a media release, and there was interest from the media. I did a few interviews, and because I run three divisions – my time is limited. So, I decided that we could do wedding Fridays. So every Friday afternoon, I accept four appointments on the hour, from 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 and 4:00, and I have time to officiate weddings. And that allows me to have that as part of my regular duties as county clerk – so, from conducting an election to all the other things, and really that provides a way to celebrate. For me, officiating a wedding has been really joyful. It wasn’t something that I ran for office centrally to do, but it was something that was important to me, and I didn’t realize how much joy would bring to my week, and so, every Friday, I get to end the week with something happy. And I always like to tell folks that weddings are great because unlike elections, there are no losers, only winners, and everyone in the room is happy after they’ve been married, and they go on their way.

Brianna Lennon: Just I’m thinking about from a management in the office perspective, and you’ve got several divisions that you’re managing – what was the what was the most difficult part, or maybe there wasn’t one, if it’s just as simple as you’re the only one that’s really affected by making the change, but was there anything administratively that you had to do to kind of reorganize things or get different resources in place to reestablish that, offering that?

Catherine McMullen: Yeah, so one of the first things that we did was I had us open Friday afternoons. The recording office had been closed, so we redid everyone’s schedules in that division so that we could be open Friday afternoons to accommodate weddings. And so, not only does it take me to officiate, it also takes my recording staff to get them a marriage license [if] they don’t already have their marriage license. They also do the scheduling for that. We determine if an interpreter is needed, and then we have an assistant in the room that can take photos, group photos, you know, with people’s cell phones and things, as well as sometimes people need witnesses. In Oregon, it takes five people to officiate a wedding. There’s the officiant, that’s me, the couple, and then two witnesses, and so, sometimes couples come in and they don’t have two witnesses that are 18 or over, and so, I have staff that serve as witnesses, as well.

And then it’s very brief. It can take between five to 20 minutes for the actual wedding, but they get to let us know what they prefer to be called, if they want to be referred to each other as husband, wife, partner, something else, and it’s all just, it’s up to them. What I have found, though, in these weddings is that each of them is different, and I will marry couples that have been together for a brief season and couples that have been together for four decades. We’ve had some really beautiful same sex marriages that were between couples who have been together for 20, 30,40, years, and they’re doing the official paperwork with me on that one afternoon.

Eric Fey: Well, I never thought we’d talk so much about marriages on High Turnout Wide Margins podcast, but this has been fascinating. I had no idea that was part of your job description, and all the thought you’ve put into it has been fascinating to hear about.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]

Brianna Lennon: When you do the marriage licenses and that obviously may end up with a change of name or some sort of procedural change to a voter registration – what does that look like? When you’re going to, you know, do you offer that to them when they come to get married? Do you say,” Also would you like to update your voter registration while you’re here?”

Catherine McMullen: We do offer voter registration sometimes. Usually, to be honest, the couples are only thinking about each other, which is exactly how it should be, but occasionally someone will say that they’ve just moved and it will be like a sibling to the couple, and we get them a voter registration card. We do also offer bedside marriage licensing and bedside wedding officiation. So, this is when, at least, one of the couple is unable to come to our office because of an illness, and, you know, my elections manager, in the past, has filled in for that, and people will mention that they’ve just moved here, and he has voter registration cards with him. So, we do do voter registration as part of that.

They are distinct and like separate items. In Oregon, you know, voter registration – you attest that you’re a citizen, and you attest who you are, and so, the document isn’t necessarily required, but, yeah, I’m not sure where I’m going with answering this question,

Laughter

But there has been an increased demand and interest in either getting married, having that legal contract or getting a passport, and that’s something that we have seen an increased interest in, and, you know, even before the increased interest, there’s been always more demand for marriage license appointments, wedding officiation appointments, passport appointments. It’s just something that we can’t quite keep up with as an office.

Brianna Lennon: Can you touch a little bit on the passport element of it? Because I think one of the things that I keep thinking about and have wondered about in different areas –  I know that you all are not DMV offices, but to me, like, from an outside observer, the kind of verification that you need to do for passports or driver’s licenses and things tend to be somewhat similar, like you are looking at documents to validate. And I look at these things – I come from this perspective of, in Missouri, we’re not looking at any documentation. We don’t need documentation for anything, and to introduce the concept to our county clerks of not only are you going to have to, like – I mean, we have to see, we have to see some form of ID. So we see some form of ID – but, to me, there’s more like gravitas that comes with you’re validating this piece of documentation in order to create another form of documentation like a passport or a driver’s license, like, that seems very heavy to me, like, there’s a lot at stake and having temporary employees or people that need additional training, like, what does that look like when you are doing that in your office for passports?

Catherine McMullen: So, our passport acceptance facility – we accept the passport applications, we don’t issue passports, and everyone in the Records Management Division, which is in a separate building from where my office is, is trained by the U.S. Department of State, and so, they have very specific rules and regulations that they follow before they’d then send on that application for actual processing and review. So, I don’t know if that’s going to be what you’re getting at. For marriage licenses, you know, people have to bring in a photo ID, and then we ask that they bring in their birth certificate. On a marriage license application, which then becomes the license to get married and then becomes their official record that they were married, depending on where it is and being filled out, we ask both for, you know, their birth places, as well as their parents’ birth places, and that documentation is sometimes things that’s only found on the birth certificate. And often, a couple won’t have access to that birth certificate or may not know all that information, and it doesn’t stop them from getting married. We just end up putting in an “unknown.”

One of the things that I wanted to mention earlier, maybe there’d be a way to fit this in – what I have discovered, and what I felt without taking the data really, is that many of the couples that I officiate weddings for in the office – English is not their first language. And I did take a look, you know, I’ve officiated weddings for 70 couples this year so far, and half of them, at least one of the couples was foreign born. So, 50%, and then looking at their parents’ birth places, it rises up to about 56% and, you know, Oregon is diverse. Statewide about 10% of Oregonians are foreign born, but I think that difference between 10% and 50% really speaks to the accessibility and affordability of getting married in our office. It costs less than $200 to get the marriage license, to have the ceremony and to get that certified copy showing that you are legally married, and that’s something that comes out with the folks that I officiate for each week.

Brianna Lennon: I think I – so, from where I was kind of looking at was – so much of the conversation that’s happening in the current environment is about having documentation, and I think for Missouri clerks for sure, for many other clerks – we have no we have no process or power when it comes to what that means. If somebody comes in and wants any sort of documentation, we have to point them to other offices. And I think it’s really interesting that that is not necessarily the case in all clerk offices, that there is some overlap, and I’m wondering how that’s going to impact you, because I look at when there are questions about proving documentation, we are, like, our offices just have to sit and wait, but you have some ability to – I mean, you could open more passport acceptance windows, you could do more to produce the, like, start the process of documentation, and I’m just wondering what your thought processes at that level. Is it the same as the kind of thought processes you had of, “I want to start doing marriage licenses again.”

Catherine McMullen: Yeah, so we are intentionally working to increase capacity. In June, we’re going to start Walk-in Wednesdays for both marriage license appointments and passport applications because all of our appointment slots continually get filled, and yet, we don’t have control over some of the documentation. So, whenever we’re going through that passport acceptance process, we’re following what the U.S. Department of State requires of us. With the change away from the gender marker “X”, we no longer can accept passports with a different gender marker, and that’s been something that we’ve had to work with, and, you know, really, we do see an increased demand, and we’re working to meet that demand in the same way that we might have an increased interest in voting in-person or having accessibility in other parts of our county. I mean, it’s really all part of that role of making local government accessible to everyone.

Brianna Lennon:  Is your office mostly county funded? Because the other part of thinking about these things, like when you decided to do marriage licenses, all those kinds of things, anytime that I would want to add some additional services or something, it’s in my budget, I have to present my budget to my county commission, which is not an elections board. It’s not like in Eric’s conditions, where you’ve got an election board – commissioners, you’ve got to present this and all of that. I get to decide how to administer things, but I don’t get to decide how much money I have to do it with. Are you in a similar position or like when you’re looking ahead at “I’m going to expand services. I’m going to do these things” – here’s that money come from?

Catherine McMullen: Yeah. So, we have a few different funding streams. We are heavily reliant on the funds that come in through recording. So, whenever someone buys or sells a house that’s recorded in the recording office at the county, and there’s a fee attached to that. The county clerk gets to keep about $5 of each transaction and because of the way the housing market has been, the number of transactions that happen has dropped dramatically. And so, less of our funding comes from internally, and more of our funding has been coming over the last few years through our general fund.

 Now in the past, any funds that we had, more than what we needed in recording, to fund recording elections and records management would then go back to the general fund. So, we’re talking about general fund dollars because the County Clerk’s office is, of course, part of the county, but we are between 40 to 50% reliant on general funds now each year. We do get a nominal fee for passport applications, wedding licenses, and then, per statute, I charge $117 each time I officiate a wedding, but none of those fees do more than pay for the time it takes to provide the service or the materials. So, we are very reliant on the decision makers, our budget committee, which is made up of the Board of County Commissioners and members of the public. [They] ultimately approve my budget each May.

Eric Fey: Catherine, are you allowed to utilize funds from recording documents for non-recording purposes, like elections?

Catherine McMullen: Yes, we have to, historically the recording divisions in statutory counties like Clackamas County fund elections. It just hasn’t – as the cost of elections has gone up and the volume and the revenue from recording has gone down – it’s no longer possible to do so, which is why we’re somewhat reliant on the general fund now.

Eric Fey: I’ve heard a few other Oregon county clerks mention this dynamic – as a state County Clerks Association, have you all put your heads together to think of alternative funding sources? Or has the state talked about chipping in, to any greater extent, as a result of the decrease in property recording?

Catherine McMullen: Yeah, I’ve been involved with our association of county clerks at the state level since, gosh, 2017 and that has always been a topic of conversation. We are in an active legislative session right now, and we do have a Legislative Concept put forward that would allow us to increase our fees, but I don’t know if that will make it through a legislative session this year. 

If there are other ways to fund elections, my office has been really aggressive about applying also for federal grants, be it from the US EAC or through FEMA, through Homeland Security, and we’ve been successful in securing those. Just, you know, whether or not all those grants are going to come through at this point is unknown, but we use it for outreach, for education. We have a grant where we hire college students to be election workers, but we’re also using some of that federal money to do a badly needed safety and security remodel of our two lobbies.

Brianna Lennon: Is there anything in particular that you wanted people to know about your elections and the ways and the structure? Because I’ve just found from talking to people from other places, like, it’s, you get so used to doing things the way that you do them, that having conversations about change – you seem very open to change and wanting to have those things, which is fantastic, like, what advice would you give to offices that were trying to do more community-oriented things and maybe getting some pushback about it not being necessary?

Catherine McMullen: Yeah. So, you know, we have limited resources just like everyone else. One of the things that I leave with, though, is community outreach and making sure that everyone – either we, if we meet them outside the office or inside the office, that they feel welcome and that we’re able to help them with whatever their needs are. We do that by making it part of everyone’s job.

We, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we have 20% bilingual staff, so that we can serve everyone that lives here in the county. And those staff aren’t just assigned to language access, but language access is part of their role in my office, and we have elections specialists who are bilingual that will officiate a wedding on Friday afternoon because the couple needs assistance in Ukrainian, for example.

And then when we also have recording staff that will volunteer to do an outreach event. We had a really successful first Juneteenth for the city of Gladstone last year, and we had recording and election staff working together to provide voter education, as well as information about what a marriage license is, what it takes to get married or what real property is and how that all works. And so, you know, while they are distinct divisions with distinct job descriptions, my staff have learned that we need to be flexible when we’re providing services because to the public – local government is government, and a lot of the public do not know what a clerk does and what a clerk doesn’t do, and what’s part of a different part of government, and what’s something that’s under my umbrella, and it’s important that we’re working to provide access to those resources when we see them.

Eric Fey: You’ve been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I’m your host, Eric Fey alongside Brianna Lennon. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.