MINUTES OF THE INFORMAL MEETING OF THE JOHNSON COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS:
FEBRUARY 3, 2010
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Executive Session: Evaluation and Goal Setting of Social Services Coordinator Amy Correia....... 1
Site Visit: Discussion with County Recorder Kim Painter, 913 South Dubuque Street.................. 1
Chairperson Stutsman called the Johnson County Board of Supervisors to order in the Johnson County Health and Human Services Building at 9:02 a.m. Members present were: Pat Harney, Terrence Neuzil, Janelle Rettig, Sally Stutsman, and Rod Sullivan.
Motion by Sullivan, second by Rettig, to enter into Executive Session at 9:03 a.m. for an annual evaluation of Social Service Coordinator Amy Correia under section 21.5(1.i), Code of Iowa, “to evaluate the professional competency of an individual whose appointment, hiring, performance or discharge is being considered when necessary to prevent needless and irreparable injury to that individual’s reputation and that individual requests a closed session.” Roll call: aye: Harney, Neuzil, Stutsman, Sullivan, Rettig.
Motion by Sullivan, second by Rettig, to leave Executive Session at 9:19 a.m. Roll call: aye: Harney, Neuzil, Stutsman, Sullivan, Rettig.
Recessed at 9:19 a.m.; reconvened at 9:34 a.m. with Sullivan absent.
County Recorder Kim Painter welcomed the Board of Supervisors to the site visit. Painter said she wanted to go over briefly what it is they do in the Recorder’s Office. In the Recorder’s Office are recorded real estate related documents, which are mortgages, deeds, assignments and those things located in her files in the office. She said those are used frequently by professionals, such as abstractors, attorneys, surveyors, realtors, engineers, and so forth, as they’re doing their job with property in Johnson County.
Painter informed the Board that vital records are the birth, death, and marriage records which go back to the founding of the State of Iowa. She said in some cases, the records go back even farther than that. She said that the marriage records go back to before the 1880s back to the 1850s. Painter said that they have a lot of genealogists that come in and look through those records. She said it’s very important to keep all of the legal documents on their birth, death, or marriage for a variety of purposes. Those are also the people that they see at the Recorder’s Office regularly. In addition they provide marriage licenses in the State of Iowa. It is the Recorder’s function to provide those as well as registration and titling for boats, snow mobiles, ATVs, and ORVs with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) provided software.
Painter said that they also have some miscellaneous documents in the office. The group that she said she is thinking of most prominently is the naturalization records that they now have. They were with the Clerk of Court for a long time and they were told that they could throw those away if they wanted to. But, there was an outcry about that and the Recorder’s Office decided they would take in the naturalization records, because people come in and look at genealogical records anyway. Painter said they were able to incorporate those pretty easily into their store of records.
Painter said that was the bulk of what they do in the Recorder’s Office. She said she wanted to make sure the Board was aware of how much processing they do. This is a year for boat renewals, for example, and they sent out about 8,000 postcards to people with boats in Johnson County and then people are coming in or are mailing the Recorder’s Office to renew those this year. Stutsman asked if people could do that online. Painter said the DNR is working on that and she’ll be excited when they’ve got that done. She said the way they do the DNR vehicles now is provided to them by the State. So they don’t have any ability to oversee it. She said it will come and she knows they’re working on the rollout of the system. She said they’ll be getting closer and closer to that. Stutsman informed Painter that Sullivan would not be present for the site visit, due to another meeting. Painter said he popped in for just a few minutes before the rest of the Board arrived and told her that.
Painter said those were the main things she wanted to go over with the office. She said they’ve been able to take on a lot more work than they have when she first started working at the Recorder’s Office. She said they’re able to manage an increased workload with one person less than before. She stated she thinks that is because they’ve been able to utilize technology in a good way. She said that a couple of issues have come up in the last week that have been difficult or challenging for the Recorder. The main one has been the fact that their documents, especially those from the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, to some degree, had financial institution and social security numbers, bank account numbers, and other pieces of what are now considered to be sensitive information on the documents. Painter informed the Board that those documents were made public forever, with people able to come in and look at them, and when they were posted on the web, they were posted as they were and this is pretty true in most government jurisdictions throughout the country. She said the Board would recall that in the fall of 2008 there was a story in the Des Moines Register about someone, a privacy advocate from Des Moines, finding Iowa Governor Chet Culver’s social security number on a document online. She said that event began the process of the conversation that a lot of states have had to have, which is how are they going to provide these documents to the marketplace that needs them and the citizens who need them, but still try to do something about this information that’s out there. Painter said they’re in the middle of that, where their statewide website is in the process of redacting social security numbers from all of the images. She said they will feed the Recorder’s Office back those images this year.
Painter said she hopes that her County website will be back where they want it sometime this year. She said that as of now, images are disabled from public viewing from 2002 back. She said that date was chosen because they redacted those back to 2002 by hand. She said that at least they have had at a good faith effort that she and County Attorney Janet Lyness feel comfortable with. She said if a situation were to come up, then they’ve done the very best they can. Painter said the law that was passed last year said they won’t have to have all of this figured out until December 31, 2011, so it gave them time and some additional fees to provide money for the Statewide website. She said it is an expensive process doing that because it covers a lot of numbers. It is social security numbers, any credit card numbers that are on there, any bank account numbers or credit union share numbers. Painter said that all of these things have at various times found a way onto these documents and it’s a little alarming to look and see one’s brother-in-law has a social security number on a document. So, Painter said she had to shut this down, even though everybody locally takes it for granted. Painter said that was a difficult thing, because the realtors, attorneys, and abstractors had such a great result coming in to access these documents on the website. She said it’s very tough to not be able to view them.
Rettig asked Painter if the State has the document and is redacting them, if they will give them back to her. Painter said the Recorders have a Statewide website and they are going to look at some documents. She said that the one thing she wanted to show the Board was, that she doesn’t think they had been able to look at before, was how people can submit documents paperless anywhere in the state. She said they pick them up and she said she was going to process one now so that the Board can see where the Recorder’s Office goes to look and see if Johnson County has any documents that are coming in. She said it is kind of cool to be able to be at the point where they actually have electronic submission available. She said that that’s the Statewide Recorder’s website, which was put in place several years ago. She said they also have a local viewing website. Painter informed the Board that that’s the website where the money is being sent, the work is being done, and then they’re going to turn around and give them to counties that don’t have a website. She said there are a lot of counties that don’t have the infrastructure that Johnson County does, and they don’t have websites locally. She said their attorneys are very upset that the website statewide is down and they can’t use it since it has been down. She said they’ve been able to save businesses and attorneys quite a bit of money by allowing that, to save gasoline. She said it’s even a case of fuel. She added that they have had a lot of researchers tell them it’s so nice to be able to do this and not have go into the office. She said they’ve really totally changed the paradigm of what a Recorder’s Office is. She said the incident with the social security numbers is one they have got to grapple with. Neuzil asked if someone comes in to see the hard document, would they have to redact the sensitive information. Painter said from the perspective of the Attorney General and Congressman’s Office, people come in and view the documents and they don’t have to try to hide the numbers in the books, because that would be a real undertaking.
Painter said they’ve had a website upgrade for the search website, which adds a lot of functionality. She said she just finished a presentation for the Iowa City Area Association of Realtors about that, to walk them through that. Painter said it is tough, because they have to look at so many things and they do have to occasionally go to more than one website. She thinks there have really been strides made. Stutsman said she was talking to Information Technology Director Jean Schultz and Schultz was showing her some things, and Stutsman thought the community needs to be aware of the changes. They talked about if the Board should be taping some of these things for public television. She said they could just be aired as a public service, so that people know about who the Tax Estimator is and other things.
Painter said that their marriage records go back quite far, and they will have people who will come and want to search through the records. She said that one of the things that she says about the Recorder’s Office is that they’re responsible for two very different things. She said they have to provide for innovation and leverage technology in any way they can to save money, to be more efficient, and to respond better to people. But, Painter said, the Recorder’s Office is also responsible for preservation, which is a whole different ballgame. She said it’s because of the emotional impact that these particular records have on the citizens of the County, because it is their family’s document. She said it’s a part of what the Recorder’s Office does. Painter said they’re as smart as they can be about spending money on this kind of thing.
Painter directed the Board’s attention to some books that she said were obviously not in good shape when they were still held in place between two covers. She said they were falling apart and crumbling. She said that people need to handle these and make copies when they come in. She said they have people who have planned vacations and come across the country to Iowa City in order to do their research. She said that all Recorders deal with those things. Painter said they have documents that go way back, and that’s one of the things that people look at. She said people can trace certain things in these documents too. She said the Board could see in the death records during the 1918 period there are X amount of people dying because of the influenza pandemic. Painter said that way people can know what the historical events are that occurred. She said in the naturalization records from the 1930s, from either before or after 1938 one can see that people were coming from Europe in greater numbers, and that can probably be attributed to World War II. People were coming to start a new life and get away from things that had happened abroad. She told the Board that that was an interesting side light of what they do in the Recorder’s Office.
Painter directed the Board to look at the book records including the birth, death, and marriage records. She said they have a sheet on the end of these that shows which series of years are online now. She said they have added to that as much as they can. She said they have some ongoing projects where the Recorder’s Office is adding by hand to the birth records for a certain series of years that they did not have on the database originally, but they are able to add those by hand, which her staff is doing when they have time to do that. Painter said that’s helped them a lot, too. She said they could produce the certified copy a lot faster if it’s not still in the book. Otherwise, they have to go through all that while somebody waits. For real estate records, Painter said they have all kinds of old books. She told the Board that they could see that the older ones are split apart by document type. She said when they go online, it is just the general index. She said that’s just something that has happened as they went from hardcover books to electronics.
Stutsman asked if all of those books have been scanned. Painter said that a lot of these have been scanned, but they only went back to 1983, and the documents obviously go back further, so a lot of these books were not scanned. She said it gets to be a cost versus benefit issue. She said she’s had some people locally ask if they ever plan to go back prior to 1983. Painter said there are some products available over the coming years and one of the things she wants to do is look at what is called Online Index Books. That’s where the Recorder’s particular software vendor has a product, where they can go back and put things online. She said it’s a different process and slightly more cumbersome than what people have with new documents where it’s just part of the same database, which is very slick. But, Painter said it’s still wonderful because the documents are online and people can find them and search them, but there’s just a bit more scrolling and things of that nature involved. Painter said it’s a good product, so she will probably look at doing that.
Rettig asked about the preservation efforts and if Painter does so much a year. Painter said that the fund she has to take care of technology and preservation is the Document Management Fund. She said that’s based on how many documents are processed in a year. She said in a given year, the Recorder’s Office could have anywhere between $25,000 come into that and the highest amount they got during the real estate bubble was 52,000 documents in a year. She said that money comes in and carries forward every year. Painter said she budgets whatever she thinks that they need to spend on projects for the year. She said she goes over that budget when she comes in and talks with the Supervisors, but it does carry forward and is specifically in the Code for the Recorder to use the fund for technology and/or preservation of documents.
Rettig said that Iowa State Senator Robert Dvorsky and Iowa State Representative Mary Mascher are quoting a fact that the Johnson County Recorder can process more documents in a week than some counties process in a year or two. Rettig asked if Painter was familiar with that quote and that it was coming out of the Reorganization Committee. Painter said that she was sure if one were going to talk about a county that was possibly true. She said they may have one person in the office most days, too, but she was not willing to say that’s unfair. Rettig said they have some quotes and she thought Painter should know it. Painter said she would take a look and see what they’re saying. She said when people talk about how busy they are in their offices she said she knows that sometimes in smaller offices it’s a very different scale. She said they also have the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics here and they’re usually putting out between 12,000 and 18,000 certified copies a year, and getting thousands of births and deaths because of the hospital. She said it’s very different than what a lot of counties have. She said they have great growth in Johnson County, too, so they know their real estate count is going to be higher, too. She said that Linn County has traditionally been a lot higher than Johnson County, in terms of that, and she’s curious to see what those numbers look like post-flood and whether their document review will go down. Painter said there’s a lot of talk going on about structure and it’s bound to happen in a slow economy. Stutsman said it’s true. Painter said she thought they have an obligation to try to determine what they can do and how efficiently they can do it. Painter said she wanted to look at some of this, do a quick search, and then she’d let the Board go. She said she wanted to show the Board how the old marriages look on the computer.
Painter showed the Board members the marriage search on the computer. She told the Board that to access the marriage search one needs to click on the search button. She said if just a last name is typed in, the search will bring up all of the scanned records of marriage for that name. Painter searched the last name “Smith” and that brought up 13 “Smith's", bride or groom. The event’s date and the filing date are shown. As an example, Painter brought up the record of two individuals who were married on January 9, 1948 and also had their marriage record filed on that day. She told the Board that if they were to click through there, the records go in chronological order, until they reach the oldest ones, which pop back in a little bit later. She showed the Board some of the Recorder’s Office oldest records. She showed the Board one that was from 1909.
Painter informed the Board that the oldest records had been scanned before she started working there. She said that former County Recorder Deborah Conger had somebody go ahead and scan them. Stutsman asked if Painter had said she could perform a marriage search from home. Painter said no. She said vital records are completely different because they list people’s mother’s maiden names and all kinds of information on them. Vital records are controlled by the State and they have never allowed any competing databases or internet. Painter said that the only thing they did was back in the 1980’s when the Mormon Church, the Salt Lake City group, was going through, they did work with them. So, Salt Lake City has stores of Johnson County’s vital records, too. Stutsman asked Painter to clarify whether one had to come into the Recorder’s Office to look up marriage records. Painter said that they do. She said that because they have done this, there are all of these tools that are available, which allow people to magnify and do various things to enhance the image, and then print it out. She said that the 1909 record was a pretty old record, so people are able to find quite a few marriages at the computer.
Painter said that they help people with that as they’re searching. She said if they’re looking for genealogical stuff, the Recorder’s office takes care of them, too. She directed the Board’s attention to other computers, on which the public can do real estate searches. Rettig asked Painter to type her name into one of the searches, to demonstrate that the new records are readily available online. Rettig said that it was neat that the new records just pop up like that. Painter said that they do have the applications also, by the State Registrar, the Recorder’s Office has both of those items, the application and the actual return certificate after the fact. Painter told the Board that if they ever needed help looking for something and doing a search that they need help with, to give her a call.
Recorder Clerk II Diane Dunlop told the Board that when they sign in to search for Iowa Land Records, it will take them to a page that shows the e-stubs that have been submitted in the different areas. Painter told the Board that these are documents submitted by people who are signed up for Iowa Land Records and indicate electronically that they want a document to go to Johnson County. Dunlop said that they would bring this up and it brings up the document that they’ve submitted then the Recorder’s Office would print the document. She said that the document will come up, just as it is here and the Recorder’s Office will print it so that they have a hard copy, which they will keep until the billing comes through to make sure that the billing is correct. She said that they print that off and then go through the editing part of it. She said that when people submit these documents they do their own brief editing, like putting in the grantor or grantee or buyer and seller information. Dunlop said that they don’t have them put in legals because they’re a little bit trickier. She told the Board that they just go through the tabs and the general information comes up and will let the viewer know that it was a mortgage, the date of the instrument, which is all on here, the parties involved, and they make sure that the names are the same as the ones on the document. She said that everything was ok on this particular document and listed that grantor and grantee. She said they skip over properties. She said if there were any associated documents or if there were any documents attached to it, such as if it were a release and it refers to a book and a page that it is releasing, then they would add the book and page number so that it’s connected. That way if anybody goes to search then they’ll know that that. She said there were no associated documents with the one that she was showing the Board, so that she would go ahead and review it and make sure that the fees are correct, which they are, $89. Then they approve it, submit it, and submit proof. After that, the document is done.
Harney asked once that is processed what do they do with the document. Dunlop said they’d go through and do complete fee instruments. But, once they’ve gone through the complete fee, which will make sure all of the names are in there, they do the key verify, to make sure that they were indexed correctly and then they put it in the spreadsheet as received and was charged. So, that way when they go through and balance the checkbook, all balances. When it’s all correct, they make sure that the image is showing online and it’s done and goes in there. Then, about every 30-45 days they go through and then those documents will be destroyed. Harney confirmed that they would be shredded. Dunlop said that if it comes up that something is not balancing on the balance sheet, then they have something to look back on and see exactly what it was. Painter said it is a little dicey for them to not print everything, because if they have anything go awry later, something doesn’t look right, and that image is all they have, then they have to try to go back to that bank, which could be out of the State. She said they get a lot of things from the secondary market, so it could be something that’s from a huge bank in California that the Recorder's Office would be trying to get it back from. It’s not totally paperless on their end, but on the other end they don’t have to mail something.
Painter said it’s an interesting thing, it’s almost like they got done before the marketplace was ready, at least locally. She said that people like the trust factor, the comfort level that comes with handing something in personally. She said that the Recorder’s Office still has a lot of people that come in and hand in their documents. She said that some of the banks have curriers. She said it is a process of educating. She said she’d be at the Coralville Marriot Hotel & Conference Center in March 2010 to attend the Mortgage Bankers Conference that’s going on there. Painter said she’ll be there with Iowa Land Records. She will be talking to the local people and they’ll try to show them things and get them interested in e-submissions. The Board thanked Painter for the site visit.
Adjourned at 10:05 a.m.
By Nancy Tomkovicz, Recording Secretary