(Rant On!)
I do a little mapping for a small mountain town. This has been an ongoing task with them updating the zoning map, new subdivisions, boundary line adjustments, replats and the like for the last 60 years for the firm I work for.
Two weeks ago, I was asked to update the town’s map to show a recent replat of a block in downtown. I tell the town manager, no problem, I’ll have the Clerk and Recorder send me her scanned plats. (I pay an annual fee to receive pdf’s of the recorded/deposited survey plats each year, or when I request them). The replat the town wants to show on their map was recorded back in March of this year. The clerk has another survey firm in the area do the scanning. The other firm picks up the mylars from the court house and takes them to their office to do the scanning. This process seems to take 3 months to complete. Why, I don’t know.
My rant is about the availability of public records. Is it legal for the clerk to allow public records to leave the court house vault? Why should I or any other person have to chase down these surveys when they are supposed to be in the court house? It's 3-4 months before they are back in the county’s possession.
I have offered the clerk our services of coming to the court house every 4 months to scan the surveys right on site. No waiting for a minimal fee of $5 per plat and I can keep a copy. It’s 1-1/4 hour drive. Pretty reasonable fee I’d say for about 10 plats every 4 months.
I want a copy of that dad-burn replat! The other firm has not returned my calls from last week and this week!
(Rant Off!)
There is a company around that does rehab of paper deed records.
Their sales pitch is a disk of images lasts two years and paper
lasts 500 years. Three piece-suits and commissioners are wined and dined.
Two clerks in Kentucky fell for this and paid $500 per book for rehab.
Deed books were sent off-site for several hundred miles.
The Louisiana State Land Office had all of their maps, plats, and field notes of the original GLO surveys of the entire State done in-house. Nice stuff to look up for free through the internet.
Very nice to get online. Plus the staff has always been very helpful when requesting field notes (I know the notes are online, but it is so much easier to have the fine folks in Baton Rouge to do it for us).
"Is it legal for the clerk to allow public records to leave the court house vault?"
I don't know about the 'legality' of it, but I do know that our clerk has sent plats off to be scanned and placed a note that they were unavailable at that time.
It seems that the time they were gone was something like a week or two.
Most often these records are copied in house. In our state the law say's "with written permission a surveyor may take records with them". Good luck getting written permission. It seems like a bad idea for these records to be sent out. Leaves a chance for records to be lost or damaged.
For years when I worked at Cella Barr in Tucson, our researcher, Billy Plunkett, the most trustworthy individual you could imagine, was allowed to take original plats out of the recorder's office and print them. They knew he would guard them faithfully and they would be returned.