 for you. My name is Adam Pange, Boyden County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring and today we're very pleased to have some special guests from our Register of Deeds office. First, Ellen Schleicher and Nyla Born are both with us today to talk about the roles and responsibilities of Register of Deeds. And if you're wondering what is the Register of Deeds office, whether you're going to be purchasing land, selling land, having a child, getting married, and the list goes on and you may need the services of our Register of Deeds office. So welcome both of you. It's good to have you here. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us. Ellen, let's start with you. You're a new face to county government and a refreshing one at that. It's nice to have you aboard and why don't you share with our viewers a little bit about your background and when you became Register of Deeds and some of your roles and responsibilities as Register of Deeds. Okay. My husband and Michael and I have been married for 27 years. We have four children live in the town of Lima. I am a former, well, leave of absence worker at Kohler Company. Began the Register of Deeds office last January after being appointed by the governor when Darlene Navas retired. We belong to Blessed Trinity Church. During my married years and working years and raising kids, I attended Lakeland College and got my degree in business. And my role as Register of Deeds is an ongoing learning process. The official role would be, you know, that we have to buy state statutes, record and keep our documents that come in safe. And we archive them and index them and we assist the public when they come in to look up their deeds or mortgages or whatever. We help them out trying to help them find out, get information on their land. Now you're surrounded by, I know, some great staff. I know you feel real good about the employees you work with. How many staff do you have in the department and in general, what's your budget look like? Well, with Nila and I, there's eight of us, eight full-time people. And we have a budget of around $600,000. Though I would have to say that we do not use any dollars, any tax levy dollars are the fees that we charge. We're pretty self-sufficient. So we use no tax dollars and sometimes we can even give some tax, some money back to the county. Now, and obviously of our 23 departments, Register of Deeds, not having to rely on the tax levy is just fantastic. I mean, we'd like to keep it that way as long as possible. It's a benefits taxpayer and you've done a nice job. When were you appointed by the governor? How long has it been now? I started, I was appointed actually November 24th of 2005. I remember because it was my anniversary. I started, was sworn in on January 6th of 2006, ran for election in November 7th of 2006. And so I've been there 12 months. So appointed because Darlene left mid-term and I just ran successfully and were elected. So very good. And as you said, eight staff in total in the department. And Nila, you've been one of the the steady individuals in that department. Obviously people come and go, but when Darlene left, obviously we lost someone with tremendous knowledge and who was really, when you thought of the Register of Deeds office, I think you thought of Darlene in the same breath because of her experience there and her tenure there. And when she left, obviously a new person coming on who like all of us, it takes a little while to learn the ropes. But Nila, you've just kept things going, seamless, a smooth transition. When did you first start with the Register of Deeds? I started in 1986. I've been there for almost 21 years now. Very good. I've enjoyed working all those years with Darlene and now with Ellen. Very good. And you have a role with supervision with the staff, correct? I'm the deputy and I have also my title as office manager. I oversee the office, the workings, the when there's questions that come up if the staff has a question. They usually come to me to see if I can assist them. We try to go with what the statutes say and if there's anything that we're not sure of, we always go back to that. But the staff is very knowledgeable in themselves and in checking documents over and if they have a question, they come to me. So let's drill down a little bit. Do you touch very briefly at some of the roles and responsibilities of the office? I know you have a close working relationship with the business community. What are some of the documents that you predominantly deal with process related to the business community? The most often used ones would be a deed, which is the document that transfers the property from one person to another. The next would probably be a mortgage. If there's a lien that they need to put on the property when someone buys property, they do that through a mortgage. There's other ways, but it's most often a mortgage. And then the one that tends to confuse people at times would be the release or satisfaction of mortgage. They are not real sure what that does. We'll get a call once in a while that'll say, you know, what does this document do? And we explain that it simply releases a mortgage that was already put on. And then there's sometimes a new mortgage done, sometimes not, sometimes it just releases that mortgage. But the banks and the credit bureaus, the attorneys, the title companies all have to come to our office or they can search online remotely to see what is in our office as far as mortgages and deeds. And if there's any encumbrances on the property that would not allow it to be sold, they have to clear that up. But they get all their information from us, basically. So it's generally, if I'm buying some property or if I'm selling a home, it's generally not the individuals involved in that transaction that are coming into your office. It's often representatives, one of the bank or lenders. Correct. Yeah, usually it's title companies or attorneys that are coming in. A lot of times it won't be the banks themselves, they'll hire a title company or an attorney's office to do searches for them. And deeds in Wisconsin are supposed to be prepared by the attorneys. So because they know how to do them, they have the paperwork. And it's the safest way to do it, just to make sure that it's everything is done properly. So what in general is the process of recording a deed? But what are the steps involved? What happens? A deed is prepared, again, usually by an attorney or a title company. We don't have anything to do with the preparation of the documents. They then bring that or send it to our office. Everything is recorded in number order in our office. We have to be careful with that. We check the documents over to make sure that they meet the statutory requirements, and that all signatures are on them and everything that's required. Then they are receded through our system. They are scanned into the system so that the image is available to be seen. They are indexed. The information is typed into the computer. And they are verified to make sure that what was entered is correct. And then at that point, once everything is done, then they are sent back to whoever we are instructed to send them back. So it's quite a process that takes about four weeks right now to return a document. And a very important process. I mean, recording those documents and having those in a safe place, a lot of money and people's lives, I mean, really often the biggest investment they make is buying a home or buying some property and pretty important service to provide. Right. The statutory fees are all set. I don't know if you want to talk about that, Ellen, a little bit more. Well, if someone has as a situation where they come in or get that recorded and then I'm going to turn it over to Chairman Gehring here, I know that there is a fee charged. And as you just alluded to, that's a statutory fee. Right. All the fees are consistent throughout the state. They are set by the state statutes on what we can charge for a recording for a copy for your birth, marriage and death certificates. The search, the searching, if we assist in a search, that's all, it's not like we can say as a county, okay, we want ten dollars for this, you know, pretty much it's all set by the state, by the legislators, and it's the same in every county. Very good. Thank you. We've talked a little bit about recording mortgages and deeds, but your office also does provide other services. I was born in Sheboygan County. What if I wanted to get a copy of my birth certificate? How would I do that? Well, Bill, I just happened to have a copy along with me. You can come into our office from seven or eight till five every day, Monday through Friday, and we have these nice forms you can fill out. We would need a proper identification. You can fill out the form and we can get you a certified copy within usually takes about five minutes. And that's the same with a certified marriage record or a death certificate. You also, if you don't want to come into the office, we have the forms online on our website, on the Sheboygan County website, www.co.sheboygan.wi.us. Hey, it took me a while. And the forms are available on there. It's one of the three forms, or we have quite a few forms on there, but the death marriage and birth certificate forms are on there and you can send it in the mail and with along with your check. And of course, we always need the money. And then we return them back. We process them and return them back to the requester. What type of documentation would you require, like a driver's license? Right, correct. For identification, a pictured driver's license would be sufficient, or an ID, the Wisconsin IDs, or... And then why typically do people need a copy of their birth record, what? Well, years ago you probably didn't need it as much as now, but now, I mean, if you want to open a bank account, you have to have a birth certificate. If you want to get a passport, if you want to get your license, if you want to get married, if you want to get a job before you're 16 or 18, you know, for work permits to register for school, you need a birth certificate. For just about anything for traveling, you need a birth certificate. For just about anything that you do nowadays, you are going to have to be, you are going to be required to have a certified birth certificate. Just... Even a bank account, is that what you said? You need a birth certificate for that? Well, to get your social security number, you need to have the birth certificate. I forgot, social security was one of the most important ones. But to get your social security number, you need to have a birth certificate sold. And you need a social security number to open up a bank account. So, yep, it's very important. It's a very vital part of that office. And we issue a lot of certified birth certificates. Shifting gears a little bit more and more people are interested in genealogy. Can your office help people in their genealogical search? How would you help them? We do help a lot of people with their searches. What they do is they can come into our office, we are open from 8 until 5. And there are certain searching hours that we have set as far as when we assist people, if we have to help them with the books. Because we, most of our records in our office are all, have all public access. The public can come in and see just about anything. We do have some of the birth and the death and the marriages that have confidential information on them. So, the public doesn't get to see that part of the record and thus we have to assist them if they need to look at that record. But with family history for the most part, they're looking at older records. They don't need to have anything covered up so they can pretty much look at those themselves. They would just come in, there's an application they would fill out. And we would then show them how to use the records. We have indexes that they would search first to see what records are in our office. And they can look at the actual records themselves and they can write down any information off of those records that is public. And they don't have to pay for that part of it. If they would like a copy of what is on our records, then it's, there's the fees again are set for those. But there is, besides the birth, death and marriage records, there is all the land records that they can search back. And all of our records go to about 1850. They start roughly in the 1850s. So with land, they can search it back to see who owned their piece of property back most of the time to the government. They can see that. And a lot of people will do that. For the most part though, we have people that come in and just want to look at the birth, death and marriage records and search their families. And sometimes they won't find a record and they'll wonder why. And most of the time it's because Wisconsin didn't start putting records on file until 1907. They didn't get good at recording them until the 1930s. So a lot of times there's gaps in a family that they just didn't come to town and record them for some reason. A lot of times when they did come, they would record whole families in there. So we have a lot of information. Is any of the like birth and death record stuff automated or do you have to look through a manual index or file? Most of it is a manual index. We typed everything in. In the beginning it was handwritten and then we started typing. We do now have, we've just started to automate some of it. We have gone on to a access program where we enter the volume and page of where you can find a certain person's record and they can take that information and then go to the book itself and look at it. But that's still, we still print those out on paper and put them in a binder. We just don't have the computers to have them looking it up themselves yet. We talked a little bit about the county's website. Is there other information available on the website for your office? Sorry. We actually have, you can, instructions first, really note your real estate transfer returns, checklists for recorded documents to make sure you have, we have instructions on what is a proper statute, accepted state statutes. We have attorney general's opinion on re-recording, information that would be vital to when you want to bring a document in. We have maps on file. You can look up certified survey maps, subdivision plaques, condominium plaques and cemetery plaques. And we also have UCC financing statements, again the birth, death and marriage certificate forms request, the fee schedules and escrow application and application for remote access. If we have a contract out on, if you would like to, instead of coming into the office, you can get information remotely. So, how is that remote access work? Has that cut down people coming into the office? Has it saved the county money or been a moneymaker for the county? It does cut down a lot on people coming into the office. They don't, they're not required to come in. If you want, we have two different types of remote. One is called tapestry, which is more for the occasional user, you know, if somebody wants to go out and just look up some information maybe once a week or less, they can go to the site called tapestry. It's landrecords.net is the actual website for it. And there they would search, they have to pay a fee for that. Our information is on that site, it is not the county's site, but our information is accessible from that site. The other one is called Laredo, and that is more for your attorneys and your title people, the ones that use it daily and use it a lot during the day. There is a monthly fee for that. It's based on how many minutes, there's different levels, and it's based on how many minutes you actually would want to use it during the month's time as to what you would pay. And there's a contract that they would sign, and that is out on the website, or they can get it from our office for that. Tapestry, there's no contract, you just go to the site and you can use it. Thank you. Very good. We've covered a lot of ground, and one area I'd like to go back to just for a second is birth certificates, because obviously people living in Sheboygan County, they weren't all born here. And I anticipate there may be some people watching this program who think, well, geez, and I really ought to pick up a copy of my birth certificate, or I'm thinking about going to Canada or Europe and need to get that birth certificate. What if they weren't born in Sheboygan County, or if they're retired and, you know, they've been all around the country, how challenging is it to get that birth certificate? It's not at all. If you know what county you were born in, most of the counties in Wisconsin anyways, or most even within the United States has a website you can go to, you contact that county, or you can actually come into our office and we have numbers for, you know, like the states where they can call the state, find out what, you know, get a number for their county and request a birth certificate. If we have forms, and I guess maybe I just want to go back, I had a gentleman that called me two weeks ago and was looking for a marriage certificate from Manominee, Michigan, and was asking me if I could get it for him. I said no, but, you know, I did call there and I got phoned out the information for him what he needed. So it's pretty standard even in, even in Michigan, except for, she said we don't have forms. So I scratched my name out on our form and I gave it to him and he sent it to her and got his marriage certificate. I mean, their fees are different than ours and stuff, but it's pretty, it's pretty good. I think most of them are, it's a national, you know, no matter where you go within the, if you're, I think you're from, you know, from California, if you're from California, and you know the county you're in, you just contact that register of deeds or the state and they would, you know, make sure that you got your, you actually just, if you don't have a form, sorry I should really say that, you just state your name, your birth date, parents name, you can write it on a note, a letter form, we get them all the time and how many copies you want and if you know what the fees are because I don't think anybody is going to give you that information without paying for it first, but you can send it to them and most of the time that will take care of it. So whether it's a marriage license or a birth certificate, they may be able to get on the website and contact that county directly in another state and if they're uncertain or not quite sure how to do that or don't have access to a website, they can contact your office and you'll point them in the right direction, give them, excellent, excellent. You've talked a little bit now about the roles and responsibilities of the office and really from A to Z, from a standpoint of the importance of the documents you're handling, but some viewers might be wondering, well just how busy are these folks? How many documents actually come through that office on any given year? Any, I'm sure you have a flavor for that, is it hundreds, is it thousands, what are we talking about? Well if we, on an average day, I would say we get between 100 to 250 to 200 documents of the documents that sell, that does not include the birth, marriage and death certificate requests that we have, but I would, and some days, you know, can be, some days you can stand at that counter for, you know, the whole day and you have people coming in, you can be doing anywhere from 50 to 100, I would say, birth certificates. Sometimes, you know, we, of course, we get requests for the mail also, so it all depends, it just some, you know, but we do a lot of documents, I would say, on the average, at least 300 between both the mortgage and deeds and, and vital records. 300 a day, yep. Wow, so that adds up to an average, it is a lot of paperwork, and you mentioned early on, and I know your department takes some pride in that, and you should, you're the only department that isn't relying on property tax levy to offset or supplement your operations, and you talk briefly about the fees, so anyone who comes into your office, whether it's a birth certificate or a marriage license or recording a deed or a mortgage, there is a state established fee that they need to pay in order to have that document recorded or get a copy of it. Is that right? And generally, what are we talking about? What, what, what are the ranges, some of the fees that are charged? Well, for the recording fees are, it's $11 for the first page, and $2 for each additional page of the same document, that's just to record a deed, a mortgage, whatever type of document it is, then there's the fees set for the transfer, what we call a transfer fee, that is $3 per thousand of the value of the property being transferred. That is also set by statute and collected. The birth records are $12 for one certified copy, $3 for each additional one. The marriage and the death certificates are $7 for the first certified copy, $3 for each additional one. So folks don't like how much they're being charged. You're not the ones to complain to because it's, it's in the statutes and really it's a state legislative matter. Right. Okay, well we only have a couple of minutes remaining and Ellen, as you said, you've been in the job now for about a year and I know that between you and Nila it's been a seamless transition. What are your and what are your impressions as you, as you look back the last year and do you have any goals or things you'd like to achieve as we go forward? Yes, I do and thank you for that because I, I always forget to tell this, you know to tell people how great my staff is. They have been supportive since I started, have helped out, have answered my questions and I have asked a lot and still do. So I really, really appreciate Nila and the staff. They have just been wonderful. We do have some goals. Nila and I have been working towards, we, shortly after I started, we, we did, we did a electronic transfer returns where we were getting the real estate property returns electronically. And now we were looking at doing e-recording, which is another form of bringing documents in only through the email. The documents will come in and it's going to cut down some on paperwork a little bit, hopefully a little bit less chance for error though we're almost perfect. Not quite, but we're almost. We, I have to say that those girls are pretty good with their, you know, there's a, the error margin is very small. But the e-recording is something that's really starting to come through and we're working on that. Hopefully trying to get that together by, get it in place by sometime early in 2007. And I have a goal to try and get us some money in a different way or not money in, but a different way of paying through credit cards and debit cards. Currently we only take cash or a check. And sometimes it's easier for people to do the credit. I'm trying to work on something with that. But so those are our goals for 2007. And of course, to try and continue to do our work on our customer service and keep the county taxpayers happy. Standing. Well, it's been a pleasure to have you both here today and a lot of lot going on in the Register of Deeds Office. A lot of very important work that most people take for granted unless it impacts them directly, but appreciate the work you do. And and Register of Deeds, Ellen Schleicher, Deputy Register of Deeds, Nila Bourne. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. On behalf of the Sheboygan County Board and Chairman Bill Gearing. Again, my name is Adam Payne, County Administrator. Thank you for joining us. We like having these monthly programs to keep you aware of the different departments we have in county government. As you know, 23 departments, $155 million, a lot going on. Next month, we'll have our new Highway Commissioner, Greg Schnell, here to talk about what's going on with the Highway Department. Until then, best wishes and happy holidays.