After many years of supporting the Upper Arlington City Council and walking residents through the city’s political process, city clerk Beverly Clevenger is about to call it quits.

Clevenger, 59, who began work with the city’s development department in 1995 and took over as clerk in 2007, will retire at the end of this month.

While city clerk is not a high-profile position, residents who have dealt with local government will likely recognize Clevenger’s voice, either from hearing her call roll on a council vote or from the other end of the telephone when a question needs to be answered.

“The clerks, we act as the conduit between the residents and city council, and also between the staff,” Clevenger said. “Our role is to be the first face that the residents see. Arlington’s council makes themselves available, but we keep things running smoothly.”

Working as council’s administrative support, Clevenger and her staff work to schedule and coordinate the items on council’s agenda, organize the city staff’s reports explaining legislative items, record and archive the minutes of every public meeting held in the city, deal with reporters’ and residents’ public records requests, and offer support during council meetings.

“I joke with people that I have a bed in Westerville, but (the Municipal Services Center) is basically my home,” she said. “It’s just unreal the number of meetings we work through. Last year, with work on the city’s master plan, searching for a new city manager and city council member, we ended up working 131 meetings.”

Helping residents when they have requests or questions is one of the more rewarding parts of the job, Clevenger said.

“Upper Arlington has a lot of informed residents, and we get a lot of records requests,” she said. “I think that’s one of the reasons many of them live here, because of the level of service the city provides, and they want to know what’s going on. I think that we have very educated residents in this community.”

Growing up on a 15-acre farm in the little town of Buffalo, W.Va., Clevenger moved to central Ohio as a young woman “like a lot of other people, because that’s where the jobs were,” she said. After working a large portion of her clerical career in the Columbus school system, a position opened in Upper Arlington’s development department.

“It just seemed like a natural fit for me,” Clevenger said. “The staff here feels more like a family. I’ll miss everyone here; the girls that I work with here, it feels like I’m leaving my children. You get to know everyone’s families.”

Retiring from the city will give her some time to spend with her biological family, however. Clevenger said she recently moved her parents up to live close to her in Westerville, and that she intends to travel to California this spring to visit one of her daughters.

“I’ll maybe still do some part-time work, but I’m going to get my reading in finally,” she laughed.