Travis County Commssioners Court
June 24, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Items 20
Northbound 20 is to discuss and take appropriate action on work load issues in the county clerk's recording division.
>> dana debeauvoir, Travis County clerk. The clerks who have helped so put the information together today are sitting with me here in court. Let me also make a new quick introduction to the court. The new financial manager of the accounting department for the county clerk is here. His name is jeff chisholm. He comes to us with a certified financial planner degree in addition to a cpa, so he will be a big help to the county clerk and Travis County in general. They are probably going to head back to the office because we do have a little bit of a problem today that I think for the most part is solved but it ties in perfectly with what I need to talk to you about today. And I知 going to be brief because I view today's explanation as the beginning of an ongoing conversation that we need to have of the level of work load and then on the good side for you folks, the level of revenues this this increasing work load is causing for the county clerk. Here's essentially the challenge that we're facing. A whole lot more documents are being filed with the county clerk's office, especially over the last 12 months than have ever been filed before. We thought it was a temporary increase, and what we've been able to do in a 16-month analysis is figure out that it's not, it is permanent. As of right now I知 actually 147-person-hours behind in processing liens and because of liens and documents that title companies send me. To give you an idea of the scope of that problem, of what 147 person-hours means, if I were to take my entire deed indexing crew of six individuals and have them work all that 147 hours overtime, that would be overtime of approximately four days and the problem would be about $4,000. So while it's not a big money problem, solving it has turned out to be a much more complicated venture. The six individuals that do the indexing take about a year to be trained to do this job. They are pretty much exhausted right now from turning out at the same pay and at the same number of hours a lot more documents than we've seen in the past. If you subtract the 147 hours that we're now behind schedule right now, they've actually been able to absorb most of -- not always, but most of what has turned to out to be a 46% annual increase in the number of pages they're having to handle in order to do their deed indexing work. Now, that 46% increase that's happened over the past 16 months is what's getting us an additional one million dollars in additional revenue this year. I want to give you a picture of what it's all about. If I could call these six folks and have them go to work extra for six days, we could have no problem at all. Overtime for those folks is not going to be a reasonable thing to ask. It's a little unusual. And trying to find six more individuals who would have this level of skill and knowledge and are going to be able to do that job isn't going to be possible either. A couple other things I need to let you know about. Two of our top producing indexers are not going to be able to continue to work at the level that they're working now. One of them we may lose permanently. One of them has an intermittent problem that I would be happy to discuss with the court in an executive session under the personnel amendments. In addition to that, the county clerk's office is also having kind of a happy outbreak of things in our office and i've got a bunch of folks who are going to be at various times over the next few months absent for a variety of reasons. What that means is that the backup plan is also beginning to come unraveled in addition to this 147 hours cuent problem that we have right now. The people that have some level of expertise in being able to do the deed indexing that can cover when we've got an illness or something like that are beginning to drop by the way side for their own personal ronz and personnel reenz that I would be happy to talk to you about too. Commissioner, do you have a question?
>> under budget amendments and transfers, we approved 10 budget line item moving around of stuff, a lot of it sounds like it's related to exactly what you're talking about. Does this solve your problem or there's still something what's beyond in the pbo memo that we sent ahead and eye proved related to transferring of recording specialists general fund for -- and it's all covered by forecasted revenue beyond what you thought is falling in. -
>> you are correct that the consent action that did happen today addresses this issue. What I知 trying to explain to the court today is what you're seeing there is the solving of the back problem and the solving of what we thought was going to be the problem for the rest of the fiscal year, okay? What I知 trying to say to you today is that in addition to that i've got another is 47 hours that we're slipping. What I知 trying to brief the court on is it's turning into more and more and more. Now, I can talk to you about what the problems are because there are some solutions, and I want the court to be aware that we've got this happening. And just to give you an idea of the more practical aspect of why do you care if the county clerk is a little behind schedule, why does anybody care about that? From the standpoint of the title companies and the banks and the mortgage lenders and the folks who are just trying to buy a house, if you think about it from a practical standpoint, they're trying to lock in a low interest rate, get everything all sorted and handled, move into the new house before the kids have to start school. Now, if we can't be timely, then all of that becomes to become unraveled and that's really the practical thing that we're working on here. If I keep this work load flowing as fast as possible, then we get funding, they get their interest rates, houses get sold timely, people move in and the summertime is always a critical time for when we see our big boom. I mean, this is actually cyclical when people do buy houses so they can be ready when school starts. So this 147 hours, is part of a general trend that we think is it going to be permanent and it's also the extra boost that we see every summer. Now, the solution. And if I might ask you, judge, could we in the course of talking about this, could I ask you to bring up the next agenda item to talk about anthem automated indexing because the two are related?
>> 21 is to discuss and take appropriate action on request to purchase an anthem/at automated indexing software upgrade.
>> thank you, judge. When I came to you during last budget session, we had put additional resources for temperatures and a full-time person in the budget. We kept most of the temporary money. It's turned out to be inadequate, but I deleted the request for an additional deed indexer because I said at that time I had just found a software enhancement to the existing system that we already bought that would help us do this job a whole lot faster. Okay. That is what anthem ai index or automated indexing is. Now, still a little frustration along with other folks that this has taken longer than we would have liked to get to the point where I can bring it back to you. What I will tell you is that if there is anything I a thought the courts had oversielght over, I would have been here sooner. People are trying hard to get this done. I anticipate coming back to you very soon with what we've been working on for almost a year trying to put in place to implement this upgrade to our existing software for the deed imaging system that the records management system purchased about 22 months ago. Now, what ai indexing in a nutshell does is it says for the six folks who are abstracting from a legal document for the deed, who is the grantor, who is the grantee, what's the parcel number, that's the legal description and the other pieces of information to construct the deed index by which everybody knows who owns which property and we're all real clear on it and there's no opportunity for anybody to misunderstand it's a public record. That takes a lot of knowledge and skill and a lot of time to hand type in there, thumb through, find the right one and type it in. What ai indexing does is it builds on the existing system to be able to scan the document. It pulls out, it's smart enough to recognize grantor, grantee, legal description and it will -- once it reads that scanned page, it will populate the deed indexing fields for the typist so they don't have to enter it in. The only thing we have to do is correct, add to, subtract from, so the key strokes go down bias tro no, ma'am kel amounts. If it's 437 key strokes average for a document, it goes down to like 10 key strokes. Now, it takes a full six months for ai indexing to learn. It is an artificial intelligence tool. It takes a full six months for this software to learn the kind of records that are coming through the county clerk's office before we begin to see the first benefit of having it. But what it will do is it will enable the six folks who are already highly trained to be able to handle the most complicated documents and it will allow me to use the backup people to help process this increase in work load so that I can make the best use of the staff that we do, the temperatures that we do have, and I don't have to come back to you and ask for additional personnel. I知 trying very hard not to do that. If you have questions about what ai indexing is or what anthem is, and you may hear those terms used interchangeably, I will be happy to answer your questions, but basically it's a tool that allows the software to type in information so that a human being doesn't have to type it for them. It's more accurate and it's a whole lot faster. We focus then on validating the information instead of hand typing it in. I think it's a pretty easy concept to get. I brought with me a few copies of what the statement of work outline is if you would like to see it. Purchasing and the county attorney's office have been working with me for almost a year to get ready. I want you to know while we have a bigger problem brewing in recording in the county clerk's office, we're also desperately working behind the scenes to try to bring forward a solution at the same time. If this turns into an annual problem, and I do need to go into an overtime situation, the current scope of the 147 147 hours that we're backlogged right now is worth about $4,000 in overtime. If we were to analyze that, it would be about a 20,000-dollar problem. So it isn't huge, but it is growing bigger, bigger than the last time we visited about this problem. Questions?
>> $20,000 is not included -- what you're really talking about is --
>> overtime.
>> but alleviate the overtime, what you really are talking about is additional people.
>> ai indexing. What I知 saying is let's try our best not to hire additional people. It takes a lot of traibing to get these people up and running. They are some of our higher paid employees. There is an abstracters' job that we're trying to hire for here. Let's try not to use county resours to grow this to 12 indexers. Threats put ai indexing in and I want the court to be aware if I have to come back to you in one month and say I still have a problem, we're more than 147 hours now or maybe i've been able to cut it in half, I want you to be aware that this is going on. $20,000, you're right, mr. Daugherty, is not a problem, but people not being able to get their house bought or funded at the existing interest rate is something we are going to hear about. The title companies are going to start, you know, worrying that perhaps we're slipping and slipping and slipping and nobody is doing anything about it. Okay?
>> we'll see you back in a few weeks.
>> I would like to return to you as quickly as the county attorney and purchasing and I can to present ai indexing anthem to you for purchase. It is funded already in the budget for out of the records management may fund. We are good to go as soon as I get clearance from the other departments. And second I would like to come back to you in a month and give you an update on how we're going with the overload situation. Thank you.
>> its.
>> what do they say about it there? I知 sorry. I overshot on my part. They're involved. By the way, its did a good job. With had a downtime situation today. I知 not sure you're way wear of, and they got us up pretty quickly. But I was will b. To switch over to my business resumption software that I purchased a year ago so when I知 in this kind of situation the title companies don't suffer additionally. People's deeds don't get even further backlog and they were able to resolve the problem before I had to go to disasty recovery rejumtion.
>> would you like it back on?
>> please. I would like to do that. Thank you.
>> okay.
Last Modified: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 9:52 AM