By Tim O’Meilia
From the outside, Ocean Ridge is a sleepy, seaside town with a Cape Dutch-style Town Hall overlooking a picturesque beachside park and handsome homes lining A1A and tucked away on winding lanes.
It’s a little different from the inside, where Town Clerk Karen Hancsak sits. She’s been a town employee for 30 years, the last 21 as clerk. She’s the town’s longest serving worker.
She’s outlasted nine town managers, four police chiefs and four deputy clerks. She’s served as interim town manager twice. And she can tell some stories.
How about the hurricane — either Frances or Jeanne — which blew the steeple off the old Town Hall in 2004?
Or the small private plane that crashed into the facade of the new Town Hall while it was under construction in 2008? The plane flipped into a telephone pole and landed upside down only a few hundred yards away from the trailer that was the temporary town hall for Hancsak and other town employees. The pilot walked away with scratches.
Or the lightning strikes that seemed to light up the town hall so often that the new $4 million replacement has lightning rods installed.
Not to mention her first town election in 1990, barely a month after Hancsak succeeded 15-year clerk Rita Taylor. Weldon Yeager and longtime Commissioner Vera Klein tied with 269 votes. A manual recount didn’t change the result.
Since a tie wasn’t covered by town documents, state law required a drawing. The winner’s name was drawn out of a blue Gap shopping bag, since state law didn’t specify.
“There were a lot of reporters there but none of them would volunteer to pull the name. A city of Boynton Beach employee happened to be there and agreed to draw the name. And the incumbent lost by that method,” Hancsak said, still marveling.
Ocean Ridge’s 2002 election was Palm Beach County’s guinea pig for the touch screen voting. That election, at least, went flawlessly.
In 2004, Eric Mangione lost to George Stamos by a single vote but sued because a town employee who had moved out of town voted anyway. A judge ruled against Mangione, saying there’s no way of knowing how that employee voted and the judge refused to compel him to say.
It’s all in a clerk’s work, which in Ocean Ridge includes doing the accounting, helping draw up the budget and issuing permits and occupational licenses. “Not many clerks do all that any more. Everyone seems to have a finance director,” she said.
Not that she’s complaining. She shares the load with deputy clerk Jane Hallahan and receptionist Lisa Burns. On her 30th anniversary, Jan. 26, the town’s 24 other employees surprised her with a cake and a bouquet of edible flowers.
At the Feb. 7 Town Commission meeting, she was presented with a golden clock. “The commissioners have all been great to me over the years and even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t tell you,” she said with a laugh.
Three weeks later, a balloon printed with “30” still floats in her office, next to the dish of M&Ms. On the credenza behind her desk are photos of her son Andrew, who attends St. Thomas Aquinas College in New York on a baseball grant, and her husband, Bill, who was a police officer in Lantana, chief of security at JFK Medical Center and now works at the South Florida Water Management District.
It was Bill, then her boyfriend, who helped Hancsak catch on as a $9,000-a-year police dispatcher in Ocean Ridge in 1981. Just 20 and barely out of Lake Worth High School, she worked as a dispatcher and police clerk for seven years.
When clerk Taylor put an ad in the paper for a deputy clerk, Hancsak applied. “I think she was tired of shift work,” said Taylor, who has been clerk in Gulf Stream for 21 years. “I thought she was a good choice. I thought it would be a great advantage to have someone who knew all of the streets and knew a lot of residents.”
When Taylor left in early 2000, Hancsak was the natural choice. “She’s always been an outstanding worker and has high moral values.”
She’s impressed with the new-ish Town Hall. “We needed it when I started 30 years ago. Back then, doing the (town commission) minutes meant cut and paste and Wite-Out. The accounting was all done by hand,” she said.
Now 50, Hancsak earns $79,000 annually and plans to retire in five years.
“I love the small-town atmosphere,” she said. “I love that I know the majority of the residents and they know me. They know I’m here for the town and I really like
this town.”
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