Dallas county clerk balances hard work, family

By Judy Babb

He’s not as visible as the Dallas mayor; but Dallas County Clerk John Warren gets his share of recognition. One day, his son Garrett, now a senior at Prairie View A&M, called him because he had broken his key. He needed his dad to mail him one. Warren walked to the post office to overnight the key. The clerk looked at his name and said, “Finally I get to meet you in person.”

Warren said it was because of the volume of mail his office sends and receives daily — all with his name on it. More than 100,000 pieces of mail go in and out of his office. Last year, more than 417,000 property record documents came in.

“When I took office, whatever my predecessor didn’t do, I had to do,” he said. “I had to own what they didn’t do.”           

Warren’s job is immense and requires a lot of moving parts. When he took office in January 2007, he discovered that much of the job of preservation had not been done. Property and court records had not been digitized. They had to be scanned and properly stored. 

“It was horrible. There was no standard protocol,” he said. “There was no one way of doing things. Everyone was left to figure it.”

If there were 25 ways of doing things, it was done 25 different ways, he said. So, he figured it out.

“I worked 11 hours a day,” he said. “I had so much I had to get my arms around.”

But it wasn’t just paper. It was also employee attitude. 

“Nobody trusts government,” he said. “Apathy is the reason people don’t like government.”  

He was ready to change that. He gave employees ownership. “I wanted to incentivize them, to get them to care more.” So, he changed office protocol and, with it, employee attitude. 

He also sets the standard. He arrives at the office by 7:50 a.m. to greet his employees who arrived at 8. “I like my employees to see me here at 8 a.m.,” he said.

Still, he had the problem with all the work that needed to be done. He knew what he wanted to do but didn’t know how.

“Then I found out about the money,” he said.

The county auditor told him he needed a plan to use the money — money he didn’t know existed. Warren quickly came up with the plan. He hired temporary workers to scan court records and bought a document management system. The total for the record management and archiving was $15 million combined. That taking-care-of-business deliberateness describes a lot of Warren’s demeanor. 

He also refused to send someone away if he could help them. He told about an older man who came in one Friday afternoon after Warren had been in office for two months. Warren was planning to leave at 4:30 when older man came in at 4:20, seeking information about his step father who adopted him as an adult. Warren stayed. After several hours, they found what he was looking for. It turned out the adult adoption had happened in juvenile court.

“I’m not going to send someone away when I can help them,” he said.

He also helped his constituents by providing remote access for what typically was over-the-counter processes.

Warren doesn’t allow his job to keep him from his family, wife Patrice and son Garrett. In fact, Warren picked up Garrett from Bishop Dunne and took him to football practice every day. Then he’d sit in the stands and watch the practice. Garrett realized how much that meant. He said there were never more than six people in the stands and they weren’t always the same ones. 

Warren makes sure he is there for his family. He said his father was a super father but he was always working. His father never made it to any of his track meets in junior high and high school. He wanted that to be different for his son.

Garrett learned a lot from his father. 

“He said ‘Don’t rely on other’s opinions of you — positive or negative. Trust in yourself and what God has planned,’” Garrett said. 

After practice, family time was still his priority. According to Garrett, his dad would spend two to three hours with them before getting back to work for another couple of hours. So, Warren still puts in 11-hour days.

Warren, who used to be a body builder, now walks two and a half miles every day at 5:30 a.m. That takes him by neighbor Dwayne Eddy’s home. Eddy said they frequently talk. Delivery services have also made them friends. Their addresses are similar so they often get each other’s packages. Eddy laughed about a recent delivery. “I texted him not to call the cops, that I was getting my dog food from his porch.”

Eddy called Warren a good person and talked about how Warren cared for the people in the community. He said Warren tries to make things easier for the community. He even developed free services that allow people to find out about liens on their homes and get them released for free. 

“When I see him on the news,” Eddy said, “I always text him and tell him he’s looking good.”