Hardware and software salesmen at probably the ones who wined and dined your State Reps to get this done. Clerks probably just bought their hype. Be positive and support it but get a referendum going for the additional costs to be taken from the Clerks Budget without the ability to charge a fee to recover costs for the service.
jud.
I agree with the above. The Clerks ought to be doing their own scanning at whatever resolution they want. This will cause the clerks nightmares for a while, if they do not ignore it altogether. We still have to copy the deeds out of hard bound books on a copy machine at the county I work most in. They have most of the deeds on a computer, but have not figured out how to connect them to a printer and print them out yet. Same with existing plats.
Just had it happen again this week. Lawyer takes a plat from 7/2011 to court clerk and leaves it to be recorded; the clerk then calls me and demands a disc?! What am I to do, bill the clerk of court? If I call the lawyer and try to run it back through him or the client so I can bill the time/effort to somebody, then I am labeled as "hard to work with" or "uncooperative"; which results in NO more referrals and NO more call from that particular lawyer or client. No amount of explaining to the client or the clerk or the lawyer helps because they don't understand the law. The langauge in the Bill does not even require the surveyor to create the disc, only that the person/party submitting the plat for recording must also provide a digital copy in TIF format on a disc.
Last week I got a call from another local attorney that handles 95% of all local closings. They had submitted my disc to the clerks office for recording; soon after they got a call from the court clerk stating that the disc was BLANK. The attorney calls and informs me that I gave them a blank disc (which makes ME look incompetent) and that they need a new disc ASAP! I happened to be close by and stopped at the clerk's office and picked up the disc and took it to the my office to try and figure out what had happened to the TIF files that I knew were loaded on the disc. I put the disc in my computer,and discovered that the files were in fact, on the disc. So I go back to the clerk's office and instruct the personell there on how to open the darn disc!!
Most every court clerk that Ive talked with tells me that the law was created by the SURVEYORS! They either don't know or are now trying to spin it so that the surveyor is to blame for all the new headaches that this is causing.
I run a small 2 person surveying business, and if all this is happening to me then I can't even imagine the trouble larger and more busy surveying offices are having.
