Seriously confusing isn't so serious...

They have a pretty sweet racket at the County Courthouse building. Bureaucrats operate there with titles like head of the Department of Vital Statistics or the Expunging and Sealing Department. It's all quite mysterious.

"No one knows exactly what we do..." Pat Frank said. She is the Clerk of Circuit Courts for Hillsborough county and also the Comptroller. It means she takes care of money.

Racket is a squishy term. Legally it's a dishonest money-making scheme. Oh boy do they make money there. They collect $19.4 million in court fees annually, for things like closing on a home ($8-10 a page) or the ever-present $1 per page of a record provided. This is a deterrence from $0.15 that we are used to seeing. Just try not to pay those court fees. They hire private collection agencies - sounds foreboding - to make sure those fees make it to Tallahassee, then back to them.

Fortunately though, the language of their policy says they can charge up to $8.50 for every page after the first on a residential deal, and up to $1 a page for a copy of a record.

Doug Bakke, from Expunging and Sealing, shrugged that off by saying they always charge the maximum. It was nice, like an errant 'go screw yourself' shouted over traffic.

The county building has suffered a budgetary shortfall this past year - blah, blah, blah the economy. As a result, Frank said they had to eliminate 100 positions at the building. It was very algebraic. The building had a shortage of x and an abundance of y, simply remove y and bingo, there's z.

Their office does provide an valuable service though, one that is not matched anywhere else. They are the liaison between the courts and the public.

"You don't traditionally think of calling a judge to get a record," chided Frank, and would he/she even care to give you one? Probably not.

The millions of dollars that fill the Scrooge McDuck money pit at the County Courthouse is used for expensive systems that sort and manage the hundreds of thousands of pages of information they must maintain. Like Joanne Constantini's software that automatically identifies social security and credit card numbers that need to be redacted by a human operator later. These things are expensive for software engineers to create.

Not to mention the retention span that information must be held by law. Digitally speaking, computer servers are a hassle to maintain for those types of records. In the case of juveniles, that is 75 years. Even if Bakke expunges this information it leaves telltale signs that the record was there, and is now not.

At the end of the day, the raise in fees is reminiscent of an Oscar Wilde quote: "Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." New technologies need more money, and more money funds new innovation that costs even more to maintain, but streamlines the customer service side of business.

That's the other definition of a racket. A business.