Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2004:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2006:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2007:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
April / May

Current entries

Monday, August 29, 2005, 10:56 am

From the Clerk-Register. Today's message to my staff.

This morning, we are apparently on the verge of the worst natural disaster ever to hit this country: the total destruction of an important city; as many as one million homeless; damage measured in the trillions of dollars.

Sustained winds of over 100 miles per hour can demolish a lot of buildings. Worse yet for New Orleans is the "storm surge" of waters which are likely to overtop levees and flood the low-lying city to depths of 20 feet or more. Still worse are the many poorly secured chemical plants and oil storage tanks there, which will release their contents and foul this water with toxic and flammable substances; anything still above water is likely to burn.

Louisiana is a distinctive place, but unfortunately the very things that make it unique make it harder to prepare for this kind of disaster. The state's tax system and legal system are radically different from any other state. Local and state governments, police forces, schools, all suffer from graft and entrenched corruption. Meanwhile, the state has tremendous social problems: Louisiana has the highest poverty rate of any state, the highest percentage of single parent families, and it has among the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease and homicide.

No doubt the failure of New Orleans and Louisiana to come up with the political will and resources to build higher and stronger protective levees (especially on the Lake Pontchartrain side) will be criticized in the wake of this disaster. But before we look down our noses at Louisiana, consider that we here in Ann Arbor have been equally reluctant to address the likelihood of a catastrophic flood along Allen Creek downtown.

Moreover, we as a nation have also failed to come up with the political will to address global warming, which causes more severe hurricanes and storms.

Closer to home, the big homicide trials are ongoing this week in the Courthouse, and security has been stepped up. Our new juror-pay ATM is working, and has received some friendly press coverage. The Deeds office is on track to reduce the document filing backlog to 14 days by the end of August. Chief Deputy Jim Dries is on vacation this week.

Individual meetings continue: I'm looking to schedule meetings this week or next with [list of names redacted]. When the workload permits, please arrange a half-hour with your supervisor and my schedule (perhaps via Outlook) for a meeting in my office.

Our friends, family, and fellow citizens in New Orleans are in our thoughts and prayers.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Friday, August 26, 2005, 3:03 pm

MARD v. MLTA. Since I am Register of Deeds as well as County Clerk, I'm a member of the Michigan Association of Registers of Deeds (MARD).

("County Clerk" and "Register of Deeds" are separate elected positions in 50 Michigan counties; the remaining 33, including Washtenaw County, have combined them as "County Clerk and Register of Deeds".)

Title companies make up most of the business at a Register of Deeds office, and the title companies also have a trade group, the Michigan Land Title Association (MLTA).

In the past few months, the relationship between MLTA and the Registers has become strained. Some of the Registers are baffled by the actions of the MLTA, and wonder whether the members know what their association is doing. Today, the president of MARD sent a remarkable letter to each of the members of MLTA, as follows:

Dear MLTA Member:

You know us, you work with us regularly, and we recommend your services to the people of Michigan. We are the Registers of Deeds in the State of Michigan. Our service is to all of the people of Michigan, and yet for some reason Michigan Land Title Association has decided to single us out and challenge what we do for the people.

In the past year, MLTA has filed a multitude of lawsuits against various county Registers of Deeds. MLTA has attempted to defame our names with our State Legislators by claiming we are monopolizing records and using unfair pricing. MLTA has sent press releases to local newspapers attempting to influence the people of Michigan and inflict Registers in a negative light.

Some of your larger members whose main offices are not even located in the state of Michigan have filed lawsuits against Registers in the United States District Court stating Registers are in violation of federal anti-trust laws, monopolization, due process, and unauthorized establishment and maintenance of abstracts of title. This was decided in favor of the county Registers, and yet your association continues to spend money to appeal the Court's decision.

Title companies have filed suit against some counties who have requested if a customer is purchasing consecutive, contiguous copies of records in a bulk format for a reduced fee, that the customer sign a "no resale" clause. Although this practice has been upheld in the Michigan Court of Appeals, MLTA continues to call this unlawful and is appealing to a higher court.

Some members of MLTA want to purchase the images at a discounted rate and resell them regardless of the cost to the County and smaller MLTA members. Your own members may be driving the smaller MLTA members out of business. They want to purchase the images for next to nothing and resell at a huge profit, at the expense of the local taxpayer, County government, and you.

MLTA has become a very litigious organization. Rather than working in cooperation with Registers, Treasurers and other local officials, your association has decided to challenge all we do. MLTA has demanded FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests from Clerks (five years of logs, records, and reports), Treasurers, and Registers ("received" instrument and "entry book" information). This action ties up our offices with busy work when we should be placing more instruments on public record; we are then chastised if we are behind.

It seems the bottom line is that the larger title companies and batch plants are nervous and vindictive of the Register of Deeds becoming more user-friendly. With county records on the Internet where all have access to the images at the statutory one dollar per page copy fee, they are concerned with their profit margin, regardless of cost to the county or to smaller title operations.

Perhaps you may want to evaluate if this is what you want of your organization. Is this where you want your membership dollars invested — in more lawsuits? A few members are using your association.s good name to their interest, not for the interest of all MLTA members. In the past, the Registers and MLTA members have had an amicable and friendly relationship. That relationship is in crisis. This continued animosity is only harmful to your industry and to the people of Michigan.

Sincerely,

Lori A. Wilson, President
Michigan Association of
Register of Deeds

I won't argue with the strategy here, but I should say that I'm accustomed to receiving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests; making sure they're quickly and appropriately fulfilled is part of my job, not "busy work".

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

Friday, August 26, 2005, 10:32 am

From the Clerk-Register: A few more letters to my staff:

Thursday, July 28:

I returned last night from the 97th annual meeting of the Michigan Association of County Clerks.

At the conference, we discussed many issues affecting county clerks' offices.

In particular, he drive for greater security of identity records is going to affect all of us directly. Quite soon, the state will require people to provide a recently issued birth certificate for renewal of a driver's license. And there will be a process, similar to checking a credit card, for verifying that a driver's license or birth certificate is valid, or at least, corresponds to one on file. Of course, anyone applying for a driver's license renewal (presenting a birth certificate) or a copy of a birth certificate (presenting a driver's license) would be subject to this.

What about people, like my late father, who have lived their lives under a name different from the one on their birth certificate? Glenn Copeland, the state registrar of vital statistics, said that under these new rules, if my father were living today, he would not be allowed to obtain a copy of his own birth certificate!

So, what do we tell someone like that who shows up at our Vital Records counter? "Good question," he said. That was all.

Karen Edman made a brief presentation to the Clerks about our county ATM, soon to be installed in the Courthouse lobby, which will dispense cash payments to jurors, eliminating the need to write thousands of small checks. The cost savings is very significant (not to mention the greater convenience for jurors), and I expect that many other counties and courts will follow our lead on this.

The Deeds world has also been turbulent lately. The president of the Michigan Association of Registers of Deeds has resigned, and there has been a lot of conflict within the organization. At the same time, the Land Title Association has sent Freedom of Information Act requests to every county in Michigan, asking for detailed information on Deeds office finances, cost allocation studies, the technology fund, and the documents which were filed in each office last May 9 and 10. Many Registers expect the information obtained will be used to attack the $1/page image fees charged by Deeds offices.

Here in Washtenaw County, our Deeds office, while adapting to a new computer system and various problems encountered along the way, fell behind on filing deeds, to as much as 35 days. Yesterday, the office met its July goal of reducing that backlog to 21 days. In August, the goal will be 14 days. Congratulations to all the Deeds staff!

Our new 2005-06 county directories are back from the printer, and are available at the Elections office. We're already thinking ahead to the 2007 directory, so your comments or ideas for content or design would be very welcome.

My individual meetings with staff members continue. Currently up: [list of names redacted]. When the workload permits, please arrange a half-hour with your supervisor and my schedule (perhaps via Outlook) for a meeting in my office.

Monday, August 1:

Welcome to the new month!

Tomorrow, Tuesday, is Election Day, for Webster Township and the even numbered wards of the City of Ann Arbor, as well as many jurisdictions in surrounding counties.

On Friday, Deeds Chief Deputy Jim Dries and I met in Detroit with the Registers of Deeds of Wayne and Oakland counties (Carmella Sabaugh of Macomb County would have been there but wasn't feeling well), and their chief deputies, to discuss pending legislation and the recent requests from the Land Title Association.

Today, our Elections office received proposed recall ballot language for two officials in Augusta Township. We have scheduled the Election Commission's clarity hearing for Friday, August 12th at 10:30 am. The three members of the Election Commission are Judge Archie Brown, County Treasurer Catherine McClary, and myself.

I'm hearing many positive comments about the look of the new county directory, as well as suggestions for things we should include next time. Among other things, we should definitely include detailed pages for school districts (including a countywide map showing school district boundaries), and perhaps special units such as downtown development authorities and YCUA. I'd also like to provide some concise but readable tables of population and SEV by jurisdiction. If you have further comments or suggestions, please let me know.

The new county ATM is scheduled to be installed in the Courthouse lobby this week, perhaps on Thursday. This will make it possible to pay our circuit court jurors in cash, rather than writing thousands of paper checks.

My individual meetings with staff members continue. Currently up: [list of names redacted]. When the workload permits, please arrange a half-hour with your supervisor and my schedule (perhaps via Outlook) for a meeting in my office.

Many, many thanks to everyone in the office, for striving to treat every customer with courtesy and respect, even when the weather is unbearably hot.

Let's have a great week!

Monday, August 15:

(1) The ATM is working! I'm very pleased to announce that the demonstration of our new Courthouse ATM for paying jurors went well this morning, and there should be something about it in the Ann Arbor News shortly.

Karen Edman gets full credit for her persistence over more than a year and a half in bringing this effort to fruition.

The big test will be next Monday, when we have a number of jury trials starting. These will be the first jurors to be paid with a plastic card instead of a check. The ATM will dispense the appropriate amount of money to the juror the first time the card is used. Jurors will have cash to pay for lunch or parking, rather than having to wait 4-6 weeks for a paper check in the mail.

Of course, that will also save the county from writing and processing more than 600 juror pay checks per month.

Very likely our new system will get statewide and national attention from other courts interested in more customer-friendly and economical ways of doing business.

You can also use the ATM to get cash from your checking account. The fee per withdrawal is $1.50.

(2) New Work Rules. Following several months of consideration and rewrites, I am also pleased to announce new work rules for the Clerk-Register's office. A copy will be provided in a separate email. The new work rules resemble the old 2003 work rules, but there are some important changes.

First, the new rules state that "Professional development is encouraged." You may attend up to four training classes per year, not including mandatory classes, if it would add to your ability to do any job in county government — it's no longer limited to just your present job.

Second, the dress code of August 12, 2002, which lists dozens of specific clothing items and details as acceptable or unacceptable, is superseded by a simple statement in the new rules:

You should dress every day in a manner that shows your respect for the people we serve. Your choice of clothing should reflect your professional status, and should never distract or distress any visitor. "Blue jeans" may only be worn on Friday, and must never be worn in court.

The interpretation of this standard will differ from setting to setting, where work needs and customer interactions are different. Consult your supervisor if you are in doubt about any clothing item.

Third, we have clarified the gift section with the following:

Seasonal gifts from the people and firms we regularly serve shall be shared by all office staff.

One section of the Work Rules has not changed at all, but bears repeating here.

The Clerk/Register's Office is comprised of various divisions but we are one office. All staff members are expected to work together in a friendly, positive, cooperative and professional manner. We are all part of the Washtenaw County Team and we are here to serve the public in the most prompt, courteous and effective manner possible.

(3) Individual meetings. I'm looking to schedule meetings this week or next with [list of names redacted]. When the workload permits, please arrange a half-hour with your supervisor and my schedule (perhaps via Outlook) for a meeting in my office.

Let's have a great week!