Unlike their routine weekday meetings that are generally filled with votes to approve contracts and hire personnel, the Sunday meeting called five years ago included an emergency declaration to address developing concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.

At that time, Blair County had no confirmed cases.

But county Director of Public Safety Mark Taylor accurately predicted that it was just a matter of time.

And in light of the declaration, the county offices and its court system prepared to modify daily operations to reduce the amount of people inside the courthouse while maintaining access to government services.

Blair County Prothonotary Robin Patton, seen in 2020, often administered the sale of marriage licenses in the hallway outside her courthouse office during the COVID-19 pandemic in an effort to maintain social distancing guidelines. Mirror file photo by Kay Stephens

In the weeks that followed, that declaration led to more computer interactions and greater reliance on audio and video telephone systems to conduct routine business, meetings and court proceedings.

It also led to months of social distancing, the wearing of facial masks and the installation of hard plastic dividers on counters, desks and judicial benches, all expected to curb the spread of a deadly virus that was causing people to become ill and in some cases, to become seriously ill and die.

“It was a really strange time,” Prothonotary Robin Patton said recently when asked what she recalled about that time. “And one I would not want to go back to.”

Patton said she and her staff responded to the pandemic with efforts to keep the office open and services intact. But that wasn’t easy.

In the beginning, couples seeking marriage licenses at her office had to call and make an appointment. Sometimes, those licenses were issued in the hallway outside her office door, where there was greater space to observe the six feet of social distancing recommended to reduce potential exposure to the COVID-19 virus.

Blair County Commissioners Laura O. Burke and Bruce R. Erb listen to county emergency management director Mark Taylor during an emergency Sunday meeting at the courthouse on March 15, 2020, where the county made an emergency declaration to address developing concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. Mirror file photo by Patrick Waksmunski

In addition, county employees with COVID-19 symptoms and those exposed to others with symptoms were told to stay home and observe recommended quarantine periods.

Patton said that left her and one other employee in their office on a day when five others couldn’t report to work.

“They either had COVID or had to quarantine because of COVID exposure,” she said. “And that was a time when we were cleaning off our desks every night, wiping off our phones with Clorox wipes. It really made a lot of extra work for us.”

It was also a time when county employees learned new skills.

During the pandemic, Deputy Prothonotary Kristy Oakes was sometimes seen seated at her desk in the first floor office, looking and talking into a computer screen that provided video and audio access to courtroom proceedings on the second and third floors.

Clear plastic panels used to help prevent transmission of COVID-19 are now stored in a hallway at the Blair County Courthouse. Mirror photo by Kay Stephens

For those proceedings, judges were presiding in courtrooms with only a few people present. In some of those cases, attorneys and defendants may have been in their offices or homes, also relying on computers for video and audio access to court proceedings, via transmissions that weren’t always reliable.

“Can you hear me?” was a common question at the start of a court hearing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“You’re on mute,” was another common declaration, sometimes remedied by a handwritten message that a courtroom staffer held up to a computer camera, so it was visible to the person who appeared to be speaking but couldn’t be heard.

Judge Daniel J. Milliron, who was regularly on the bench during the pandemic, frequently acknowledged his own lack of training in technology, but came up with a sometimes successful remedy for transmission difficulties.

“Turn your computer off and then turn it back on,” Milliron told attorneys having difficulty when trying to join a court proceeding from outside the courthouse.

Since those days

After the decline of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blair County resumed in-person attendance at most court hearings. The exception has been remote proceedings with some state prison inmates who opt to rely on audio/video transmissions set up through the state Department of Corrections.

While state prison inmates can insist on being transported to Blair County for court appearances, the ones who participate in proceedings via audio/video transmissions avoid potential changes in inmate housing and services.

According to President Judge Wade A. Kagarise, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked an ongoing debate over the use of remote proceedings, with viewpoints often traced back to experiences during the pandemic.

“The use and efficiency of remote proceedings usually comes down to two positions,” Kagarise said. “It’s either let’s do more of that or let’s never do that again.”

Kagarise said that speaking for himself, his conclusion is that the debate is a good thing because in looking to the future, technology may play a role in addressing the needs of the courtroom, but only if remote proceedings can be done well.

“You have to invest in the equipment so you can do them efficiently and effectively,” Kagarise said. “And we — the county and the court system — have to make sure we have the right equipment. Right now we have one Zoom account for our entire court system.”

During the pandemic, poor audio transmissions not only affected what happened in the courtroom, but also the records of those proceedings.

Court reporters, tasked with preparing word-for-word transcripts of what happened, increased their use of the word “Inaudible” when typing transcripts with poor audio transmissions.

Judge Jackie Bernard, who now has a large screen TV in her third floor courtroom that connects to audio/video transmissions from state prisons and to laptop computers for showing things like police camera video, referred to the pandemic as the catalyst for greater use of technology in the courtroom.

“We all needed our technology to be improved,” Bernard said. “And I think the pandemic showed us some of the options as to how some things could be accomplished.”

But the judge also recalled her dissatisfaction during the pandemic while attempting to preside over a court proceeding — via computer — with multiple people engaging through computer connections.

In a courtroom, the participants for that proceeding would be seated in the gallery, waiting for their criminal case to be called.

But during the pandemic, Bernard said she watched a woman walk away from her computer and start to make coffee. Others were smoking cigarettes.

“This was a court proceeding and they wanted to engage in behavior that they would not be doing if they were in court,” Bernard said. “So it was definitely not the best way to get this kind of court proceeding done.”

Optional courtroom set-ups

As the COVID-19 pandemic began generating local cases and fear of exposure, jury selections and related trials were initially canceled, then later resumed with alterations to the selection process and to courtroom set-ups.

Instead of summoning one large group of potential jurors for an all day selection process, the county started summoning two smaller groups of jurors for half-day selections, thereby allowing potential jurors to sit farther apart from each other.

Today, the process of summoning potential jurors in two groups — one in the morning and one in the afternoon — remains intact.

“That’s one change we’ve continued with since the pandemic, mostly because of the convenience for the jurors,” Kagarise said. “They seem to like the half-day obligation and we are mindful of that. But it means that we’re probably calling in more jurors than we need.”

While today’s potential jurors sit side-by-side, potential jurors during the pandemic were seated with greater distances from each other. That was possible in Courtroom 1, where a set of risers was set up to provide a third row of seating behind the jury box, thereby allowing jurors to have one or two empty chairs between them. Chairs in that jury box cannot be moved because they’re attached to the floor.

Bernard, who in August 2020 convened a medical malpractice trial in Courtroom 1, recalled the benefit of the risers.

“They allowed the people in the back row to get a better view of what was happening,” she said.

The courtroom set-up also drew praise, Bernard added, from the Allegheny County attorneys involved in the case.

“Those attorneys from Pittsburgh were so pleased for this case to go forward and in a courtroom,” she said, “because at that time, Allegheny County was convening jury trials at their convention center.”

Criminal case statistics

While the COVID-19 pandemic was blamed for backlogging the county’s criminal cases, the high point was reached in 2021, based on statistics compiled by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.

In 2021, AOPC indicates that Blair County started the year with 1,613 pending criminal cases — almost 300 more than the 1,320 cases it had at the beginning of 2020.

But at the beginning of 2023, Blair County’s pending case count was down to 1,318. However, with an increase in cases filed in 2023, AOPC determined that the county was poised to begin 2024 with 1,438 pending cases. Statistics associated with 2024 will become available in August.

One statistic that has increased since the pandemic — which may or may not be linked to the pandemic — is the average number of Blair County’s pending cases that are more than one year old.

Statistics show the county, in 2019, had 249 pending criminal cases that were more than a year old — equal to 18.8% of its pending cases.

In 2020, AOPC showed the county’s cases more than a year old had increased to 330, and in 2021, the number increased again to 354. After a slight drop in 2022 to 351 cases, the number of cases more than one year old climbed to 370 in 2023, which AOPC identified as 25.7% of the county’s pending criminal cases.

COVID-19 affected CYF staffing

The COVID-19 pandemic can also be linked to other county operational changes that continue to influence today’s operations.

The county’s Children, Youth & Families office lost a significant amount of employees during the pandemic, many of whom found other jobs at a time when the county’s pay level wasn’t high enough to attract replacement workers from minimal pools of job applicants.

The inability to keep up with the work resulted in provisional operating licenses, state intervention and assistance and greater reliance on local agencies to handle required tasks.

While staff in the CYF office has increased, it continues to operate with a provisional license that’s up for review in May.

Another pandemic change

While the state began in early 2020 to promote the option of voting by mail, it was the pandemic that prompted about 20,000 Blair County residents to apply for absentee and mail-in ballots they would use in November 2020.

Some of those applicants, however, subsequently took steps to vote in person at precincts — thereby cutting the amount of mailed ballots to 17,008, based on results posted on the county’s website.

Four years later, the November 2024 results show Blair County residents casting 16,868 ballots by mail, an option that likely reduced the wait time and lines that would have otherwise formed at local voting precincts on Election Day.

But that option also created lines — prior to the election — at the county elections office where voters asked for mail-in ballots that they could complete and submit.

Blair County Director of Elections Sarah Seymour said Thursday that the amount of mailed ballots in the 2020 race can be linked to the pandemic. But the amount of mailed ballots in 2024, she said, is associated with the contested presidential race between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump, who won the election.

“In 2024, the Republican party pushed mail-in voting and early voting,” Seymour said. “That is what we heard constantly from voters waiting to early vote or calling our office regarding early voting.”

Mirror Staff Writer Kay Stephens is at 814-946-7456.