Constable Andrea Welker, Fayette District 1

Constable Andrea Welker, Fayette District 1 Office of the Fayette Constable District 1. Elected in 2022 for a 4-year term.

Well, my plans of getting the office ready to host my first students in the clinic (entirely in-person) since the pandem...
01/06/2023

Well, my plans of getting the office ready to host my first students in the clinic (entirely in-person) since the pandemic began were felled by some basement flooding. Fortunately no documents were damaged but it’s a no-go for the moment. Mildew triggers my asthma but thankfully the industrial-sized dehumidifiers and drying fans were running.

So, I left early, swapped out my UK badge for my Constable name tag, and served some more papers I picked up today from the courthouse. But as I drove through Lexington, I know especially after the flash flooding this week, so many rental units are in far worse shape than the basement I left, and managed by those without an extensive budget for repair.

It’s the difficulty of the run-down rental units in a state of disrepair. The rent still isn’t cheap for most folks living in units with significant repair needs. But when property investors purchase these buildings and they make these significant repairs, they do so expecting to make back that money. The rent is raised and people are pushed out of their homes and communities.

So the policy question remains: how do we provide both healthy AND affordable housing in Lexington? How do we prevent people from being pushed out of our neighborhoods due to rising housing costs?

These are difficult issues and there aren’t easy solutions, no perfect ordinance that city council can pass to fix all of our problems that will make everybody happy. No one should breathe in mold in their homes, and they shouldn’t be priced out of their homes in order to get remediation. But the repairs must be made, and the repairs are often incredibly expensive. So we have to craft creative solutions and work together to improve the health and safety of our community, because what we’re doing now just isn’t enough.

Once the Office of Constable is fully built, my main focus will be on exactly that: improving health and safety for Lexingtonians. Implementing interventions. Measuring those interventions to determine efficacy. Finding what works.

So this was Day 3, put in another hour of Constabling, a full day (and then evening) of lawyering, and now I’ll be taking my allergy meds, and hopefully getting the office ready on Monday instead. :/

Day 2: So far, so good. And work completed with enough free time that I can spend the evening untangling yarn barf from ...
01/05/2023

Day 2: So far, so good. And work completed with enough free time that I can spend the evening untangling yarn barf from this skein, to make a temperature blanket for this year.

It was a pretty calm day for my law practice, so I got to work early on the paper service, starting at 4pm. Put in three hours of time (including admin time) and got 12 papers served.

Overall, things went smoothly without any difficulties, but as I found out today, what really needs improvement is my Spanish. I’ve been putting in my DuoLingo time (in addition to trying to brush up on my Italian and build my Scots-Gaelic… I like to dabble in languages and never master them) but it’s just not enough. I can read Spanish proficiently, but my speaking and listening abilities are poor overall. I need to make a real effort to improve and not rely on Google Translate. I think our Spanish speaking community deserves public officials they can communicate with directly. So, I’m going to put in more effort in this regard, and try to regain the fluency I once had, so my high school Spanish teacher won’t be ashamed of me. Any ideas for practicing conversational Spanish? (My middle schooler is absolutely not interested.)

Tomorrow, I’ll start my day early with a trip to the courthouse but I expect a late evening at the clinic tomorrow preparing for some upcoming hearings, and also to prepare for Spring semester at UK Law.

First day on the job, and already so much to do! I started the day off by fighting the torrential downpour of rain to ta...
01/04/2023

First day on the job, and already so much to do!

I started the day off by fighting the torrential downpour of rain to take my first trip to the courthouse to pick up the papers in my boxes, sorting and recording them, ready for service. I’m all set up for excellent record keeping, which will be available both to the city and to the public.

Once that was sorted, I then spent the rest of the day still getting caught up on the other day job from my almost-entire-week off work. Balancing both hats seems pretty doable at the moment, even without any deputies. Fortunately the work lends itself to flexibility. I’m sure there will be plenty of times it seems daunting, but I’ve scaled back on my extracurriculars to settle into this position. I’m on hiatus with the orchestra. No active volunteer positions at the moment. Just the work and the family.

And of course that includes working this evening. Now that I have the first papers in hand, I’m reevaluating my data collection templates.

For the city’s purposes, I’m tracking the type of civil process order, the total number received, number returned executed, total returned unexecuted, not returned (I’m assuming this is the number of papers still out for service at the time of the report), total fee collected, and total number of hours expended. The most difficult one to track accurately will be the hours, since it’s unclear what we’re measuring here (and for what purpose). Are we looking at the labor involved in serving a single paper, if so, do we want to track it from clerk’s office to the defendant’s hands, including travel time, including administrative time to record the information, or do we also want to track the time it takes for other administrative related tasks, such as billing? Are we including administrative tasks involved with indirectly serving the papers, such as running out to buy more scotch tape to put the notices on doors?

Measurement can be difficult in that way; you really need to have a clear picture of what the data will be used for in order to create the right parameters to measure it. I went back to do graduate work in public health for the main purpose of figuring things like this out, so I’ll probably be annoying certain folks by asking these kinds of difficult questions, but “annoying people with difficult questions” is also a thing I do, so do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, I guess.

What I don’t love is statistical analysis (the idea of taking any more grad level stats classes quashed my desire to do a PhD in public health). So, rest assured that I will be outsourcing to an actual qualified statistician when it comes time to do the heavy lifting of program analysis and quality improvement.

Back to the late night quandaries of measurement, to conclude the first day on the job.

(Also, budget update: running at a current deficit of $365.42 in start-up costs. Not even including the name badge, which I commissioned during the campaign.)

As we leave the holidays behind and begin the New Year, my tenure as Constable also begins, and I am honored to serve ou...
01/03/2023

As we leave the holidays behind and begin the New Year, my tenure as Constable also begins, and I am honored to serve our community in this capacity.

No pomp and circumstance for my swearing in, I’m afraid, between sick kiddos and the husband’s work schedule. Just me with my law school friend to administer the oath of office. Fitting, I think, since we’ve taken this oath together before, being sworn in as officers of the court as required for Kentucky lawyers. (Nothing has changed. Still upholding the Constitution. Still no dueling with deadly weapons.)

But now the time for celebration is coming to a close, and the work begins. As the office of Constable comes with no salary and no budget, it will take some time to rebuild the office in order to deliver the services I was elected to deliver. For the moment it is just me; once we have the details sorted out for deputies, and the permissible scope of their duties, I will begin taking applications.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable holiday, and may this year bring joy and prosperity to all.

AW

Address

PO Box 4323
Lexington, KY
40544

Telephone

+18593792175

Website

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