 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Mike Vanderstien. And whether you're purchasing a car, a land, home, need a birth certificate and the list goes on and on, you're gonna need the assistance of our Register of Deeds Office, one of 22 departments in Sheboygan County. And today we're very pleased to have Ellen Schleicher with us, our Register of Deeds. Ellen, thanks for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. Ellen has a tremendous staff and a lot of responsibilities. She started as Register of Deeds, I think it was in 2005. January 6th, 2006. January 6th, 2006. And how the time goes. Fast. Ellen, why don't you begin by sharing with our viewers a little bit about yourself and how it was that you became the Register of Deeds for Sheboygan County? Well, I live in Tonalima with my husband, Mike. We have four children and my last one is graduating this year. I'm kind of excited about that. She'll be going on to Oshkosh. So, but along with that, we have our, what the children were involved with was 4-H and FFA. So I was involved a lot with them. I also am involved with Rebuilding Together, Sheboygan, which is an organization that goes into low-income homes and helps fix them up. Kind of like Habitat for Humanity, but not quite a whole new home. It's just going in and painting and replacing windows and doors and stuff like that. That explains why nearly every day you're walking in with car hearts and the tool belt up. I never quite put two and two together there. Excellent. And the back seat is full of, you know, culled guns and everything else. Outstanding. That's nice though. I didn't know you were going in. Yeah, that's a good project. I also serve on the Media Animal Sale Committee, which is involved with the Sheboygan County Fair, Fairgrounds and work there for the weekend of Labor Day. I became Register of Deeds when the Darlene Novice retired. And the governor, they put out an application for Register of Deeds and I applied and was appointed. Subsequently, had to run for, or did that for a year and then ran. And then again ran again and won my second term in 2008. And from my standpoint, I've been doing a wonderful job. I've been a breath of fresh air for the department in the county and I know you're very busy. Please touch on some of the roles and responsibilities that a Register of Deeds has. Well, the Register of Deeds office records all less pendants, foreclosures, mortgages, deeds, tax liens, name changes, whatever pretty much anything that goes on in the county that goes through the Register of Deeds office as far as land records. We record them, we file them, we have them in computer and we help the public when they need to have help to find those records. It seems to me in the administration building, your office has more contact with the public than anyone that I've noticed other than the treasurer when it's tax time. I was gonna say probably during tax time the treasurer has much more, but we have more constant public. We have genealogists that come in. We have, if you need a vital record, your birth, marriage or death records, we also issue those and keep them in safekeeping. So our office is usually pretty busy. How many staff work in your department and about what is your annual budget? Our staff consists of me and my office supervisor, Nyla Born, and then we have six other staff members. And our annual budget is right around $700,000 right this year. However, most of our, we do not use any tax levy. So far, we have been able to generate enough income that it covers our expenses plus we give money back to the tax levy. And I hope everyone noticed how you kinda smiled when you shared that. And it is something to smile about. And I don't want any of our viewers to think that this is the norm. Ellen's department, Register of Deeds, is the only one that doesn't rely on any property tax levy. They do have enough fees to cover the cost of operating. And as you said, we hope that we're able to maintain that. We wish that more of our other departments like Clerk of Courts and others could operate like that, but it certainly helps the property taxpayer that you're able to operate without relying on tax levy to do so. Ellen, you mentioned earlier, a lot of different folks come into your office looking for assistance. And I know a number of people from the business community come in and look for documents. What is their main focus? What type of folks are you seeing from the business community coming in? What are they looking for? Well, the banks and it's usually the banks and credit unions, attorneys, title people. The title people do the searches for whenever you buy a home you have and you take out a mortgage, they do a title search to make sure that you're protected. As a buyer to make sure there's no leans on that property or anything like that. So mostly it's title companies that are hired by banks and a lot of attorneys come in also and do their own title search. Genealogists come in to try and find where their family lived. And it gets kind of interesting when you start talking to the genealogist about how they start with one name and go down back through. But we do have a lot of interest in genealogy in our office also. How far back can someone go if they're looking to research their family tree? We do have some that can, they can go back. We have records back to 1848. Our birth records and some of those records are a little bit sketchy. The land records are more consistent. But they can go back that far. We do have some genealogists that have gone back to the old country back to Germany or back to their families back there. So they interact a lot with the European countries also. I think just the name itself implies register of deeds. You're recording a lot of documents. And there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. It's not as just as simple as coming up to the front counter and dropping it off and saying, please record this. There's a lot that happens. Please walk through some of the general steps involved with recording a deed if someone purchases a property. Generally a person will go to a lawyer and have an attorney and have their document, their deeds made up or their mortgages or the bank does mortgages. But they come into our office and by statutes, everything that comes in gets a number assigned to it. And they're recorded per that number. That's a way that is fair for the businesses coming in and the person walking off the street for a deed or mortgage. It gets a number, it gets, we look it over, record it. Then it gets scanned, indexed, re-looked at, verified and then we mail it back, generally back to the customer. Birth, death and marriage records. You can come in, fill out a form. And we can get those records for you within five, five, 10 minutes. So we're streamlining that a lot. So you can get the document pretty quickly but to actually go through the recording process, how long does that take? Right now our turnaround time is about five to six days. Outstanding. I know at 1.7, 8, 10 years ago it was a couple of months. Right, in the peak there's times when, but that is they rely, the banks and stuff rely on us to get those records recorded and scanned and in the computer as quickly as possible because the title companies for sure don't like that dead zone in between a time when a mortgage is taken out and another mortgage is satisfied or they like to have that recorded because then that's showing that there's not time in between there that a buyer or someone else could come in and sneak some, I don't know, something. They always say what can they do? I don't know, I never could figure it out. But we do hear about fraud coming through from other states. So we are very leery about letting anything sit around too long. Very good, thank you, Ellen. Ellen, we've talked a little bit about mortgages and things that convey ownership. Can we talk a little bit about some of the other services that you provide in your office? We also, again, as I said before, we do keep track of the deeds or the, excuse me, birth records, birth, marriage and death records. Also name changes come through our office and veterans, the veterans, we have the veterans records in our office and we issue those records to the veteran or the veteran services as requested. We do not charge the veterans for that copy that we feel is due to them. Some of the other records that we have are certified survey maps. We have subdivision plaques. We have transportation plaques. We have many, many maps and plaques that you can look at. That's great. If somebody wants to obtain a copy of their birth certificate, a certified copy, what's the process that they have to go through? They can, there's a couple ways that they, there's a couple things that they can do. They can come into the office. We're there from eight o'clock till five. We have forms available for them to fill out. They fill out the form, show us the proper ID and we look up the record and we make the copies and give them to them. Like I said, it's probably about five to 10 minutes depending upon how hard the record is to find. They also, if they don't want to come down to the office, especially with our construction, we do take applications through the mail and you can get those applications off our website. Okay, and what kind of reasons would people need a birth certificate or a certified copy of their birth certificate? If they want to open up a social security number, they need a certified copy of their birth certificate. If they want to get a passport, they need that. Schools use, schools use this for sort of verification of age for sports or anything like that. Pretty much it's a kind of a document that is required for identity. Okay, earlier you mentioned something about genealogists and people coming in to search their family tree. What kind of services do you offer to assist these people in those searches? They come in and we give them some instruction on how to get started, checking the indexes. They cannot do birth state rules, laws. They cannot page through the books but they can check through the indexes. We have them fill out a form and they only have to do it once a year. We have them fill out a form and then after that they can just sign in, come in. They have any questions if they wanna view the birth or death or marriage records. They can do anything prior. I think it's like 20 to 30 years. They can view that without assistance but if they wanna view any of the later more current ones, there is some confidential information that they cannot see so we assist them with them. Okay, we've been using our website more and more in the county. What kind of information do you keep on the website and the register of deeds portion of that site? We have, you can get applications for to get your vital records. We have real estate documents or real estate, the rules or e-return instructions on how to fill out documents. We have, we have, I'm losing it here. We have, Annual report information. Annual report information. We have a picture of the staff. That's just very important because there it is. Anyways, we use that quite frequently. Also we have, I'm trying to think of the word and I can't. It's, you know, the little other places you can go to. All the links. Links, links there. I'm sorry, I apologize for that. No, no, no. It's an excellent question. If anybody wants more information that they're not picking up today, it's a great resource to learn more about registered deeds or any of the other departments for that matter. And you're also linked then to probably other related professional organizations. The Department of Revenue, the Department of Financial Institutions. The, there's the Children's Services is on their C-CAP. So, yep. What about if somebody wants to chip in and help build a house or, you know, assist your team? Well, I didn't, you know, I didn't put that, you didn't put that on there. No, that's terrible. Okay, that's probably a good thing. Can't quite. I don't know how I could get away with that one. Ellen, one of their access that you also have is a remote access. Could you explain how that works and why that's a little different from the normal website? Mm-hmm. We have actually two remote accesses. One is called Laredo, and it is for title companies or businesses that don't come into the office and they do a lot of researching. And what they do there is we have a sliding scale that they can purchase minutes per month, for a certain amount per month. And they also get copies at a reduced price, that is our Laredo. And we have, like I said, most of the time it's our attorneys or title companies. We have probably about 18 customers that do that now. And it's convenient for them because they don't have to drive into the office or they can work 24 hours a day if they want to. Our other website is not, it's not really ours, it actually does. They just have our information and that's called tapestry. And that would be for like, sometimes we have assessors use them if they just are looking up something, it's a 499, 599 fee. We get some credit for that when people use that, but it's more like for the casual of someone who's looking up just certain property and they have the legal description and so on. So it's 495 per search? It's 495 or 4995, I think it went up actually. And then with the Laredo program, what kind of fees are involved with the heavier users there? We have, the highest is 400 minutes or $400. It goes from $75 to $400 depending upon the minutes. Some of them were grandfathered in, so they have unlimited time. The other ones that aren't grandfathered in, anything over there a lot at time is extra fee. So that's- Does that generate a substantial amount of the revenue that your office brings in or is that just a minor part of it? Oh, it does a pretty good job. Okay. It does a pretty good job. We pay a certain amount to the software company for and generally between the two, we've actually been doing very well. In fact, that's been going steady this year for sure. Okay, excellent. With that, I'll turn it back over to Adam. Thanks, Mike. Earlier, we talked a little bit about that you're the only department that doesn't have to rely on property tax, levy, and you charge fees for making copies or gathering documents. Please touch on that a little bit more. I imagine some of our viewers may be wondering, well, if they can do it, why can't more departments do it? Where do you get your authority to charge fees and what's the range? Well, most of that was all put in place before I, and I'm sure it's been there for a long time, but the Register of Deeds Association is the pretty strong association. And they worked diligently to get legislation for their product, get legislation for dollars for their products. Everything that we charge is statutorily done. It's by statute, so there's no leeway. Even if I wanted to say, okay, I'll give you a copy, I couldn't do that. It's really technically not, but they are consistent throughout the state. Everybody charges, every county charges the same thing for records and so there is no give and take on that. Great explanation. I was hoping you were gonna say statutorily required as county government being an animal of the state, certainly the Register of Deeds is and what you charge is what the state allows you to charge. And fortunately, in your case, it's been sufficient to cover operations so far, so that's obviously a good thing. What's the range of charges? So if someone comes in for a birth certificate versus a copy of a deed, what are some different? Birth, marriage, and death certificates are $20 a piece with any additional copies are $3. So if you wanted two copies, it would be $23. To record a document, it's $11 for the first page and any additional pages, it's $2. So if you want a certified copy, if you want copies of your document, say you have a deed or you can't find your deed and you want it, it's a $2 fee for it to get that in a dollar for any additional copies. Mortgage is the same thing. The first page is $2, additional pages are $1. And generally, most of your documents, if they're one pages, it's gonna be $11. So it was between $11 and $13 to record a deed. And you mentioned earlier you have about a $700,000 budget, so a lot going on in that office. And no matter what register of deeds office you go to across the state, you're gonna get charged the same for copies or recording birth certificate consistent statewide. Correct. Very good, very good. So it's been since 2006 that I can't believe how the time flies. It doesn't feel like it's been that long since you've been on the program. It has been a while and what are your impressions? I mean, prior to becoming the register of deeds, I don't think you worked for county government in another capacity or am I wrong? No, I did not. I was not in politics at all. Well, I was, but I guess sometimes you just don't really think that. I enjoy what I do. I like helping people, like seeing people. It's fun to have them come up to the counter and chat a while. So we try and have a friendly relationship in our office that people can come in and they can feel free to ask questions and talk silly once in a while. But I think we have a really good office. My staff is really good. They know what they're doing. They're very, very knowledgeable. And on the most part, the people are pretty good coming in. Before putting your application into the governor and then obviously deciding you liked it and were good at it and wanted to continue, did you ever envision yourself being an elected department head working for county government? No, I was working in the factory or factory office but no, it probably was not something that I had aspirations for but it's good come in and work with wonderful people and that's the way you gotta do it. We appreciate the great job you're doing and glad you're there. Thank you. As certainly all three of us know very well and hopefully most of our viewers have begun to appreciate the state budget situation, the states in a world of hurt financially, 6.5 billion or more deficit, not new to county government. We've been dealing with these types of operational deficits at the state level since 1995. We're used to being asked to do more with less. We're used to cost shifts and frankly just more of the tough decisions being placed on the shoulders of county government and people like Mike, county board supervisors. You mentioned earlier you have a state association that's been pretty effective in the past and obviously lobbies state legislators for statutory changes. Anything on the horizon or frankly anything currently in play with the governor's budget that you're concerned with or that you or your association have been weighing in on? Yes, actually there is the, in August of 2007 the governor increased the fees for birth records, birth, death and marriage actually from $12 to 20 and from $7 to 20 respectively. Birth records were 12 and they went to 20 and death and marriage went from seven to 20. And the dollars that were used for that is for a good cause. It actually, that's kind of why the association supported it. The state is implementing an online system and that's federally mandated that they get an online system for security purposes. So the dollars were supposed to be used for that. The sunset on that was supposed to be July 1st of 2010. They figured they would have enough revenue generated to pay for that. The governor now is proposing to raise fees again on the birth marriage and death to $24, $23 I think, or $23 or $24. And that we are opposed to because the dollars that they want to use for that is not for the registered deeds or it's not for the programs that it should be for. We feel that the $20 is even too high. The association just thinks that that is a lot of money. The people that need those records are sometimes the very same people that they're trying to raise the fees for to help. So they're kind of paying for it themselves. It's really not quite fair. So we are opposed to that. And what was it when it went from 12 to 20 and your association supported it? What specifically was the money used for? It specifically was supposed to be set aside for online system statewide. An online registered deed system. Online vital record system. I'm sorry. Directly related. Directly related to that. And that's the way the association feels that if the dollars are used directly or for the office, for the programs that they're supposed to be used for, then they would, but they are opposed to anything that goes to other services. Just goes into the general fund, nothing related. And that's another good distinction for our viewers is that when you have to pass on those increases, whether it's from 12 to 20 or 20 to 24, that isn't necessarily for your operations in the service that you're providing directly. That's being forwarded on to the state for the state to use for its purposes. Is that right? Right, correct. And it would be, you know, actually in my feeling, if it would even benefit the county, it would be our counties, it would be beneficial, but it's not, it isn't going to, I mean, they have promised that, that some of the dollars would stay here, but eventually they're just gonna take it anyways. And you know, that's just that little bit of, I'm just a little bit upset about that. And you're not alone. The example that Chairman Van Der Stien and I often use is the clerk of courts office, Nan Todd, you know, one of your peers. The clerk of courts does a lot of important work, although they're dealing with individuals who are paying fines and working with the court system, but they've raised their fines and forfeitures over time based on state law, but unfortunately they don't get to keep that revenue. They pass that all onto the state and the property taxpayers in Sheboygan County are paying more and more and more to support that department, when if the state allowed them to keep more of that revenue that we're collecting based on the fines and forfeitures of county taxpayers, then they wouldn't essentially be double-dipped. We're passing on taxes or revenue to the state and they're paying it for it with their property tax. So all those opportunities for improvement. Well, it certainly has been a pleasure to have you with us today. I hope that our viewers got a quick snapshot of the register of deeds, very important work, a wonderful staff, a wonderful leader, and we appreciate what you do for Sheboygan County and we hope you're gonna be in this chair for some time to come. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Next month we'll have another very important department head with us, our corporation council, Carl Bissing. Carl hasn't been with us for some time as well. As you know, we try to get through the 22 departments. Some have more fires than others, but Carl is certainly one who has his fingers in all the fires because he's helping provide legal support and counsel to all the department heads, the county board, and we'll get a flavor for his rules and responsibilities. So until then, on behalf of Mike Van der Steen and Sheboygan County Board, thanks for joining us.