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Friday, April 01, 2005
Ind. Gov't. - Public records stories in the news
"County finishes first digital step to save records" is the headline to a story today in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. Some quotes:
Allen County completed the first phase of an effort to digitize aging records to preserve them and make them more accessible to the public.Meanwhile, the South Bend Tribune reported yesterday that St. Joseph County had cut a deal with the Board of Realtors to give them special access to property tax files. Some quotes:County Recorder Pat Crick on Thursday presented the county’s new ePlat system, which allows anyone to electronically search through more than 6,500 property plats and surveys with little to no assistance. She said it was necessary to begin digitizing the records because some were more than 150 years old.
“There are some that are so brittle that all you’ve got to do is touch them and they’ll fall apart,” she said.
The county hired Global Systems Inc., of Fort Wayne, which began working on the project at the beginning of last year. The new searchable database went online in late 2004.
Deepak Gandhi, Global Systems president, said the project was important because the records – by law – must be kept forever. * * *
The county paid Global $63,495 to digitize its old plat books, which date to 1825. The money was paid from the recorder’s perpetuation fund, which generates money from fees paid to record documents.
The scanned documents were corrected when errors were found and indexed for quick searching. The removal of the plat books, which will be kept in storage, freed up 10 percent of Crick’s office space.
The plats include maps and property lines of subdivisions around the county. Gandhi said the records are used by attorneys, title companies and even residents trying to resolve border disputes with neighbors. Recently, Verizon has accessed several plats as it searches for public right-of-way to install its fiber-optic network. * * *
Although the documents will be digitized, they can be searched onlyat the county recorder’s office. Irving suggested putting the records online and allowing residents to pay for them with a credit card through the county system.
The next step for Global System will be to index the county’s microfiche records into the digital system.
The St. Joseph County commissioners have approved an information-sharing agreement that will give county and township assessors and the Board of Realtors access to each other's files. * * *The information-sharing agreement has been in the works for several weeks. In February, the commissioners approved a contract with Plexis, an Indianapolis company, to create a computer program that gives Realtors direct access to property tax files.
Those files are and have been public records available to anyone. The computer program simply makes getting access more convenient for Realtors, who will be able to get the information from their computers.
In return, the County Assessor's office and assessors in Portage, Penn and Clay townships will get access to the Realtors' multiple listing service records and be able to use that information to update property valuations on an annual basis.
The move would help put the mechanism in place for those adjustments, sometimes referred to as "trending."
Legislation currently before the Indiana General Assembly would postpone those annual adjustments until 2006 and delay the next general reassessment by two years, to 2011.
Dobson said the shift to trending will help assessors follow the market and keep track of neighborhood valuations, while Realtors will get information from the county's database such as lot sizes and home sizes that will help them set prices.
No cash is involved, Dobson said, just an exchange of data.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 1, 2005 08:27 AM
Posted to Indiana Government