Editorial: Westmoreland Register of Wills has been absent for years. Just leave already

It might seem like the dysfunction in the Westmoreland County Register of Wills Office is a new thing.

The department — responsible for filings and services regarding estates, wills, adoptions and more — has been in the spotlight all year.

There was a hearing in January that saw Register of Wills Sherry Magretti Hamilton break down in tears. That was supposed to be about an appeal of litigation about late Tribune-Review publisher Richard Mellon Scaife’s estate. It didn’t stop there, though. It blew up into a contentious exchange, and judges issued orders to get the work done and filed quickly.

That didn’t happen. It was the start of a long slog that has included the court holding Hamilton in contempt. The judges essentially sat the elected official in a corner and gave the job to a conservator to get the work done.

Over the course of months, the scope of the problem has unfolded. It isn’t something that just started in January. It didn’t even start in 2023. Judge Jim Silvis issued orders in November 2022 pushing Hamilton to get adoption certificates completed. Problems dated to 2019.

That date corresponds to the campaign in which Hamilton ran against Katie Pecarchik, a staff member who filed a Right-to-Know request for the register’s “daily entry time logs.”

“I believe that the row officers, they are elected to do a job and paid to do a job, they should be there full time,” Pecarchik told the Trib in 2019. “She is not there every day.”

Hamilton insisted she was on the job all day, every day. Her husband seconded that in a March 2020 letter to the editor in which he talked about how his wife regularly “makes herself available to her constituents” at the grocery store or kids’ sporting events.

But that is campaigning to get the job, not doing it. The inability to tell the difference may be the problem.

On July 2, Conservator Jim Antoniono said he thought they were through with surprises like finding out $422,000 in collected money hadn’t been turned over to the county treasurer.

There was one more in store, however. An account with $270,000 was noted. It is funded by $10 from every document filed and meant to pay for tech upgrades. It hasn’t been touched since 2020 because the person with signatory rights retired. It is yet another example that points to an office administered by someone who doesn’t understand the job.

Antoniono has caught the office up to date in just a few months with moves including firing Hamilton’s longtime deputy last month. He replaced her with Pecarchik and said that made a difference within 24 hours.

“I feel real comfortable now,” he said.

Hamilton remains the register. Despite refusing to resign for months, she agreed, as part of the plea deal, to keep her contempt cases civil rather than criminal. She says she will resign by the end of the year. Until then, she is acting like a temp in her own office.

The register of wills has been content not to do her job for years. There is no reason to hold onto the shreds of her office now.