With almost 20 years in office and a near-encyclopedic memory of Brevard County politics and government, Clerk of Court Scott Ellis plans to retire in 2020. For real this time.
“If I quit right now, I’d have enough work to keep me busy for the rest of my life,” Ellis says.
He was referring to dividing his time between running his 60-acre farm in West Virginia, with all the chores that come with it, and rotating with his siblings to care for his 82-year-old mother in Satellite Beach.
Ellis, 61, a Republican, is thus not seeking another term in the 2020 election.
Ellis was born in Charleston, W.Va., and grew up in Eau Gallie. He graduated from Eau Gallie High School in 1976 and joined the U.S. Air Force, where he served until 1980, leaving as a sergeant.
And while he was too young in 1969 to vote against the merger of Melbourne and Eau Gallie, he still resents it. He tells people he lives in Eau Gallie, not Melbourne. When pressed, it’s the “Eau Gallie part of Melbourne.”
In fact, some call Ellis the “honorary mayor of Eau Gallie.”
“The city of Melbourne only cares about two places, Downtown Melbourne and the Platt Ranch – their ‘new Viera,’” he said.
“Few efforts are made in the rest of the city outside the downtown area, including the rest of Melbourne and the Eau Gallie area. … For the rest of the residents of the city, the world does not revolve around Downtown Melbourne.”
Ellis received a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Central Florida in 1983, followed by a master’s degree in business administration in 1985.
Between 1984 and 2000, he worked at RCA Corp., the Northrop Grumman Corp. and the Harris Corp.
Ellis first tried politics in 1986 by running against Bill Nelson for Congress. Nelson won, but Ellis said he learned a lot about campaigning.
He won the 1992 election, however, to the County Commission District 5 seat and stayed there one term.
“I was fighting a large expansion of county government, accompanied by a slew of insider sweetheart deals,” he recalls.
His goal was shrinking the size of the county bureaucracy. He and his voting allies didn’t make it, though, because of such distractions as trying to control nudity on Playalinda Beach. “That’s a federal beach,” he said. “We’re a county.”
After returning to his computer-programming profession, he won office again in 2000 at the Clerk’s Office. “That office was in total chaos,” he says of problems in updating its computer software.
The Clerk’s Office is one of the county’s largest, overseeing court records, official property records and county finance. Ellis oversaw the transition from paper to the current digital base.
But that was just technology, he says. It was bound to happen, he adds, dodging any credit for it.
“This is a job. It’s a ‘come to work every morning’ job,” he says. “It’s not a ceremonial job. A lot of people want the title, but they don’t want to do the work.”
And this isn’t the first time Ellis tried to get a break from the long hours. That was in 2012. But then former state Rep. Mitch Needelman was elected.
Needelman fired about 100 deputy clerks from the county staff, but gave them contracts as out-sourced vendors, Ellis recalled. They came back to their old jobs, but this time without county benefits.
And then came an ongoing case in which state officials accused Needelman of taking bribes and awarding contracts to BlueWare Inc. – such as $8.52 million to scan old court documents – in exchange for campaign contributions.
Needelman was convicted in October 2017 of bribery and bid-tampering charges, records show. But jury misbehavior led the courts in July to overturn that conviction and set a new trial expected in the fall.
Ellis won re-election to the Clerk’s Office in January 2012. He says he inherited the task of returning the outsourced clerks to the county payroll and other “clean-up” chores, such as disengaging with BlueWare.
But with peace and order – and the public trust – restored, Ellis says, he can safely look at retirement again. He hopes his Viera branch manager, Rachel Sadoff, will defeat retired Osceola County deputy clerk Sandy Ruizzo in 2020.
But what about all those apparent problems with the city of Melbourne overlooking Eau Gallie’s needs?
Surely he’d want to run for the Melbourne City Council to address those concerns.
Ellis pauses. And ponders. “Well, maybe,” he says. “One day.”