Including universal preschool access and broadband for all, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke has undertaken a few lofty projects, but some of her goals include modernizing the office’s core functions.
"When I physically came into the lieutenant governor's office, one of the things that we noticed was, compared to the Legislature, how antiquated our systems were," Luke said in an interview earlier this month.
Without a secretary of state, the lieutenant governor's office takes on some necessary, core functions. Namely, the office has three statutory functions: facilitating name changes, certifying international documents called apostilles, and processing administrative rules.
While many of these processes have online portions, not all the functions are simple or easy to do.
"If you need to take a document to a foreign country, whether it's for business purposes, or for personal things like adoption, and they ask for your birth certificate, you get a birth certificate, and the only way a foreign country would recognize it, is if we approve it and put a state seal," Luke said on the process of apostilles.
The office gets about a thousand a month, many mailed in. But while the application fee is only $1, the office can only accept cash or a cashier's check.
"We get the original document with a dollar attached to it," Luke said. "It's bad enough that you're giving us original document, but people are mailing us cash because they don't want to pay the cashier's check fee."
By upping the fee to $10, as proposed in House Bill 964, the office could move the process online, possibly with a third-party vendor.
There are other duties, too, like hand-posting agendas and meeting agendas that departments sometimes fax.
"We take the manual paper of the agenda and go downstairs at the Capitol and manually post on a board."
And deep within the office, you can find two closets that contain the official copies of the administrative rules for the entire state.
"It's all paper," Luke's chief of staff, Riley Fujisaki, said during a recent tour. "Depending upon the last time a section has been compiled, the dates on these vary widely."
Pulling a binder from the closet, Fujisaki examined the pages.
"So for example, this chapter here, let's see, it's from 1991, and then you have some newer sections here," Fujisaki said. "You can tell by the color of the paper, really."
To modernize the process, they want to house the rules online in a searchable format.
Senate Bill 306, which has crossed over into the House of Representatives, is how the lieutenant governor would like to ensure online formatting for administrative rules.
"Wouldn't it be great, not just as a custodian of collection of admin rule?" Luke said. "Can we revamp our web portal so it could be searchable keyword searchable in Ramseyer, and it's so much better for our deaf and blind community, too?"
It falls on office staff to quite literally hand stamp many of the documents, whether that's with a time-and-date stamp, Luke's signature, or even the state seal, which is applied with an embosser that dates back to statehood.
There will still be things to tweak, like shortening the name-change process or moving to electronic dating systems, but that’s all a work in progress.
"The way that our office is approaching it is how do we make it so that it's user-friendly for you and how is it user-friendly for the residents?" Luke said.
