About 20 people venture into the county’s auditor’s office to research properties every week.
A title company may be researching the history of a property to help prepare mortgage paperwork. Or a person might want to research the history of their family’s property or check to see when a property easement was filed on the land they own.Â
Johnson County auditor, Pam Burton, wants to make that task easier for county residents.
The auditor’s office is considering hiring SBS Portals to scan property transfer documents and index them so they will be easily accessible to the public online. The property transfer books date back to 1847 and end about 1996, which is when property transfers first went online, Burton said.
The Johnson County Board of Commissioners heard about the initiative in a mid-December meeting. The auditor’s office anticipates spending $52,000 as the maximum amount to get the books scanned, Burton said.
How the project will be funded is still being worked out, but one option is to use the Fraudulent Homestead Account, Burton said.
Now is the right time to get the project done, as the cost was three times that amount a few years ago, she said.
"This is the cheapest way to get this information stored somewhere besides these books," Burton said.
Organizing and keeping property transfers is one of the least time consuming tasks the auditor’s office is in charge of, Burton said. State law dictates that the auditor reports fiscal information and manages the budgets for the county.
The binders where the property transfers are stored are in the auditor’s office at the courthouse annex in Franklin. The books are holding up well, and the main goal of the project is to give the public more access to the books and help make sure they are in a second place beyond the physical copy, Burton said.
"These are historical documents that are housed no where else but in this room," she said.
SBS would take the books a few at a time and scan them into an online system at their Muncie office. An employee would be available at all times to field calls from the public or the auditor’s office if the information they’re seeking was in a book that was not yet available, Burton said.
How the information would be indexed is still being discussed.
Digitizing records from before 1996 should help make accessing the information easier, Burton said.
Before digitization of the newest records began, people would line up outside the auditor’s office waiting to get a look at the binders. Employees in the auditor’s office would have to set a timer and rotate people seeking information, she said.
"The list goes on and on for what people may be looking for," Burton said.
Some of the information is available online through a third-party vendor that pulls information from the auditor’s office. That information is not from the office itself, Burton said.
