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Stearns Plans State's 1st Land Records Web Portal
Kirsti Marohn
St. Cloud Times News - Published July 22, 2004
Stearns County will become the first in the state to launch an Internet service making an array of property information available at the click of a mouse.
Stearns is the test county for a Web portal created by Nazca Solutions. The first phase should be online in September.
The system is designed for real estate agents, appraisers, title and mortgage companies and others who regularly search land records.
Often they must go to several county departments, city hall and the courthouse to track the data.
The system will save them time and hassle by making all the information available online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, said George McClure, the county's information services director. It also will save county staff time, he said.
"It's sort of a new way of doing business with us," McClure said. County officials and Nazca are designing services tailored for different groups that frequently request property information. The first service launched will be for real estate appraisers. All six should be completed by the end of the year.
To use the service, appraisers will have to subscribe and pay a monthly fee. They also will be charged for downloading documents. The fees should be similar to or slightly less than what companies pay for paper copies of the same information, McClure said.
Once they've signed up, appraisers can search for the property on a map, by address, by the owner's name or several other ways. They can bring up a photo of the property, a plat map, tax statements, county and city of St.
Cloud assessments and court judgments.
That's valuable information for someone like Brock Lieberman, who owns Diversified Appraisal Services in St. Cloud. He or one of his employees makes the blocklong trip to the county Administration Center daily to search for property records.
Lieberman said the county's portal will be more convenient.
"Time is money, and for the appraisers and ... real estate companies that are in the outlying area, this will be very helpful," he said.
The full subscription service will be limited to licensed professionals, McClure said. County officials have security concerns about making every document available online because sometimes they contain Social Security numbers or other private information, he said.
However, using a credit card or electronic check, the public will be allowed to access much of the same information through the portal, County Auditor-Treasurer Randy Schreifels said. And as required by the state's open-records laws, all of the information is available to anyone who requests it in person, he said.
Nazca Solutions is led by Ted Mondale, former chairman of the Metropolitan Council and son of former senator and vice president Walter Mondale. The Minneapolis-based company has found a niche creating a system to make government data available online.
Mondale said the time he spent as a government official made him realize the need to tie together data that's often scattered in different places and databases.
"It became obvious that this was a great marketplace," he said. Stearns County signed a three-year contract with Nazca for $50,000 a year. Once the portal is operating, county employees will manage it and Nazca will provide support or make improvements, said Jason Hepp, chief operating officer.
Other counties are considering the same system. Wright, Carver and Beltrami counties are next in line, Hepp said.
For more information, contact: Jason Hepp, jhepp@nazcainc.com (612-279-6104) at Nazca |
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THE NAZCA LINES
Two thousand years ago, the Nazca Indians of Peru created a series of mystifying etchings in the desert which can only be fully appreciated from an aircraft.
The same visionary thinking inspires Nazca Solutions to see opportunities in information brokering which others miss. |
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