Clerk of Court Randy Deshotel Guest Speaker at Rotary Club

April 3, 2018

    The Ville Platte Rotary Club today (Tuesday) heard from Evangeline Parish Clerk of Court Randy Deshotel discuss the duties and services his office offers to the general public.

     The clerk of court is the chief election officer in the parish. He announced that qualifying for the fall elections will take place July 18-20. All of the municipal offices except for Pine Prairie will have an election as well as all 13 school board members in Evangeline Parish. Next year, voters will vote on offices from Governor all the way to the parish wide races such as sheriff and police jury races.

    Among the services his office now offers are birth certificates and death certificates.

    His office has civil and criminal departments. Civil matters include law suits, adoptions and divorces. His criminal department has two minute clerks that attend all criminal trials and hearings.

    The clerk of court’s office has made many improvements through the years. When he took office, Deshotel said the office only had two computers for the public, now they have six.

    The offices has digitized many records: for example all marriage records have been scanned into the hard drive going back to 1911 while mortgage records go back to the 1970’s.

    Attorneys and those in genealogy are encouraged to subscribe to the Clerk of Court’s website to access many of their records online for $20 a day or $75 a month.

    Randy Deshotel was the guest of Rotarian Maggie Ortego.

   In other business, Leonard Fontenot urged Rotarians to become Paul Harris Fellows. A club member receives that designation when he or she contributes $1000 to Rotary International, the giving arm of Rotary to help people in need all around the world. Currently the club has 30 Paul Harris Fellows.