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Electronic Real Estate Recording Task ForceMEETING MINUTES Minutes: 8 November 2001 As recorded by Bob Horton Present: (Members) David Arbeit, Jeanine Barker, Angela Burrs, Jeff Carlson, David Claypool, Michael Cunniff, Larry Dalien, Don Goedken, Bob Horton, Chuck Hoyum, John Jones (via conference call), Senator Steve Kelley, Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, Cindy Koosman, Denny Kron, Paul McGinley, Gail Miller, Bill Mori, Mark Monacelli, Chuck Parsons, Leonard Peterson, Bonnie Rehder, Eileen Roberts. (Guests) Jill Barnes, Bert Black, Luci Botzek, Joe Cashman, Mike Jordan, Scott Loomer, Beth McInerny, Lance Staricha, Jay Wittstock. 1. Call to order Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer called the meeting to order at 9.40 AM. 2. Minutes of 11 October 2001 meeting The minutes of the 11 October meeting were approved as distributed. 3. New ERER coordinator Secretary Kiffmeyer announced that Beth McInerny was selected as the coordinator for the task force. McInerny introduced herself and spoke briefly about her background and experience. She told the taskforce members that she welcomed their input and urged them to introduce themselves and share their expertise. 4. Proposed updated project timeline The executive committee met with McInerny two weeks ago to review the project and the project timeline. McInerny presented her recommendations for revision. She noted that the deadline for completion is fixed, so the only factors to revise are the budget and the specifications in the work plan. She pointed out the volume of specifications and the limits of the budget. She needs to understand the task force’s priorities, in order to make sure the revised work plan meets the task force’s goals. She explained the assumptions and risks she made before doing the revision. The assumptions were:
The risks were:
McInerny broke the timeline down in detail and discussed her responsibilities. The assessment phase includes the county surveys and the identification of standards. She suggests the task force should identify pilot counties at the start of the process. The surveys will establish the status quo in the counties. The design phase follows agreement on standards. It would include the measurement of the standards against counties’ status to understand the gap. Development and implementation follow design. The pilots will last approximately four months, until the end of 2002. Secretary Kiffmeyer asked McInerny to explain how the new timeline differed from the original. McInerny said that the pilots were shortened from 6 to 4 months. She also added details, which need to be reviewed and approved by the task force. Conceptually, though, the timeline’s end date is the same. Mark Monacelli asked about the interviews: what concerns will these address? McInerny said they would focus on the 37 concerns listed in the project report. The surveys should identify the status quo, so the final report can take into account all that needs to be changed to implement an electronic real estate recording system statewide. In particular, the business processes should be detailed in order to make the re-design practical. Paul McGinley asked if the new schedule allowed time at the end of the project to re-evaluate the standards. McInerny said that spending more time in the analysis phase would make for a better product. Spending less time in that phase means assuming a higher risk. Secretary Kiffmeyer said a bill for the legislature in 2003 does not necessarily have to be introduced at the start of the session, but there will still be a time crunch that will make it harder to absorb the information from the pilots. McInerny said the pilots could be managed differently to facilitate analysis. Aggressive management can speed up the assessment of the testing. Senator Kelley said that, to consider a bill in 2003, the legislature would not have to know all the details of the pilots; it has to know more about the lessons learned in the analysis phase and how to manage the gap between goals and resources. It also has to understand how the re-design of the business processes should be addressed in legislation. Those would be the priorities for the legislature. John Jones added that some of the re-designed business processes might not work out in the pilot and that needs to be noted: e.g., electronic signatures are a good idea but they may be problematic to implement. Angela Burrs asked if the survey would include the needs of the auditors and other officers in county government. Mark Monacelli said the question was important. Will the pilots address the counties’ back office functions? If so, then a variety of political and legal concerns will come up in the business process re-design. Bob Horton said the scope of the project has to be defined and that the scope has to address the practices and needs of private business as well as government. Because of the limitations created by the time frame and the resources available, the scope has to be clearly articulated. Mark Monacelli said the task force should look at the whole picture, public and private. For example, the mortgage industry will get the biggest bang for the buck in a re-designed process. Senator Kelley said the interview process should include the county officers and representatives of private associations and groups in order to get all the necessary information. Bill Mori said that we need some definition of the scope of the pilot up front. The intent of the task force is to define standards, not design a production system. The analysis of all the business processes in the county offices is something different. Chuck Hoyum noted the assessment must include the archival considerations, because the records have to be available, reliable and accessible over the long term. This is a primary concern of the private sector. Bill Mori said that the assessment should include the origination of the documents, which will certainly bring in the private sector. McInerny said that the Snohomish Co. Washington, project intended to do all this, but a variety of obstacles made it choose to do less. Secretary Kiffmeyer said the difference is that we are looking at standards, not the development of a working system. Jeff Carlson said other projects emphasized learning from working pilots and expanding from there. John Jones said there are many different interests involved and when any player chooses not to participate, the system will break down. In response, other projects looked for simpler transactions to automate, county by county and vendor by vendor. Minnesota, in contrast, is trying to develop an infrastructure for an entire state. That will make things possible, accommodating many interests and allowing different people to take advantage of the system as they come up to par. Denny Kron said this means counties will definitely have two different systems in place, both paper and electronic. Mark Monacelli said the goal is to develop standards which foster participation, so that everyone knows what to aim for, instead of every county developing a different approach, which would discourage participation. Secretary Kiffmeyer said the revised time line allows for flexibility. If the task force approves the broad outline, details can be changed later, but approval will allow us to move forward with the next steps. The pilots may not need to implement all the standards we select, but the emphasis on standards is important as it opens up opportunities. A comprehensive workflow analysis is a necessary part of the process. Chuck Parsons said the private sector, the users, should be included in the assessment phase. McInerny said the timeline will be revised, to include the users in the interview process. Bob Horton moved acceptance of the timeline with the caveats noted. Chuck Hoyum seconded. The motion passed unanimously. 5. Review of funding projections Bert Black presented Merrill King’s projections of funding. Enough actual filings have now occurred to allow for a more realistic projection. With the change in law to include torrens filings under the surcharge, the task force should receive approximately $944,799 for the two years, which is less than the original budget. Black added that he and Beth McInerny recently attended a conference in Massachusetts on electronic real estate recording. Minnesota’s work was mentioned favorably and the situation here is better than in most other states. Black has materials available from the conference for anyone interested. Carmen Bramante’s presentation on e-mortgages was especially notable. A link to the conference web site will be placed on the task force’s web site. 6. Report of legal subcommittee Chuck Hoyum said that a number of people met in October to identify topics to examine in Minnesota law. They identified some basic terms to start a computerized search. Luci Botzek asked the Revisor of Statutes to do the search and to expand its parameters. When the results are available, the committee will start its analysis. Any suggestions for additional issues and laws to examine would be welcomed. 7. Report on proposed legislation for revising filing fees Gail Miller presented HF 2573, introduced by Rep. Juhnke, which corrects the omission of the torrens filings surcharge. Sen. Kelley will introduce the bill in the Senate when the session begins. Chuck Parsons said that the bill’s effective date should be amended to prevent the rejection of any documents already in the pipeline. He will suggest some language for consideration. The recorders will form a committee to examine the statute on filing fees as a whole. 8. Report on technology surveys in other states Bill Mori noted that a variety of different things are going on in other states. A number of counties are implementing electronic recording in some form; different professional associations are at work developing standards; and there are several surveys underway. He felt the questions the task force needed to answer are: what information from these is important? How should it be collected for use in the project? Mark Monacelli said he was involved in a national survey that would address both county office processes and technology, but with more of the former. The details of the survey are still being formulated. Secretary Kiffmeyer said the task force could use its web site as a resource for compiling links to other states’ activities. McInerny will check into creating that. Eileen Roberts said analysis was also important, so that we can identify which projects are the more pertinent and significant. Anything that was looking at a more comprehensive approach to electronic recording would be especially important. Secretary Kiffmeyer said the task force should establish an email listserv so that we can send reports on our activities things to people in other projects and states. 9. Land records modernization committee Jay Wittstock, Luci Botzek, David Arbeit and David Claypool gave brief presentations on the land records modernization committee, of the Governor’s Council on Geographic Information. More information is available on the council’s web site at http://www.gis.state.mn.us. Wittstock reviewed the history of the committee and its participants. Botzek discussed what was happening on the local government level. She identified three issues that are probably going to affect this project: money; the differences and connections between land records modernization and GIS; and control, in terms of the relations between state and local government, but also in terms of the implications and consequences of automation. The pilots will be key to addressing these because many of the constituencies will need to review something tangible in order to evaluate the options. Mark Monacelli suggested establishing a formal liaison between the committee and the task force in order to make sure that the efforts are mutually supportive. Botzek said the land records modernization committee could serve as one of the task force’s sub-committees. David Arbeit defined a geographic information system (GIS) and explained how it could manage the products of an electronic real estate recording system. A GIS includes components for database management; imaging and visualization; and modeling. The task force should also consider how certain GIS standards could apply to its work, such as the federal cadastral data content standard. Some of these have been established as Minnesota standards through the Information Policy Council and the Office of Technology. David Claypool discussed the cadastral data standard and described the activities sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management in the western states. There has been some discussion between the BLM and the eastern states (of which Minnesota is one). This is just getting started, but there are some obvious parallels to the work of the ERER task force. Federal funds could be available for some mutually beneficial efforts, e.g., a pilot project to correlate data from real estate transactions to cadastral maps. 10. RFPs for next phases McInerny went over the estimated level of effort needed to accomplish the current work plan. On the basis of consultants working at $175 per hour, she projected the full plan would cost about $1.23 million. That hourly cost is probably high. This detailed breakdown of times and costs will be posted on the web site for all the members. For the assessment phase, with task force members participating at no cost and using four consultants, the cost would be $893,200. The design phase would be $147,000; development $98,000; implementation $42,000 and the pilots about $40,320. Bill Mori said the breakdown in relative costs was on target, indicating that the task force plans to spend more time and money on the analysis and the development of the standards. McInerny presented a couple of scenarios for the consultants. The task force needs ultimately to create three RFPs. Under the first scenario, there would be an immediately offered RFP to do the surveys, interviews and analysis. If that worked successfully, the same consultants could do the design and the architecture for the pilots. Then the last RFP would be for building and implement the actual applications for the pilots. The other scenario would be to do immediately and separately two RFPs, one for the surveys and another for the design and architecture, then a third for the applications, once the other two are complete and approved. Addressing the first RFP, Secretary Kiffmeyer asked if a representative sampling of counties would work, instead of visiting all 87 counties. This would save time, as McInerny thinks three days are the minimum necessary to interview each county. The task force also needs to save resources for surveying the state and private participants in the process. Gail Miller noted that we would need an inventory of the status quo in each county. Paul McGinley asked if the recorders could identify a representative grouping that would enable sampling. Secretary Kiffmeyer suggested having a short survey for all 87 counties, with a full analysis of a representative sample of 20. In the meantime, the task force can look for partners who might be interested in extending the survey to address their own needs. Denny Kron said we could probably lump counties together into larger groups that are representative on the basis of some studies that are already done. Bert Black asked: will the counties buy into representative sampling? Will they accept the standards that result from the process? Luci Botzek said that the county technology consortia could give us a good baseline on the technological status quo. The recorders have already done workflow diagrams for the legal process and for the filing fees legislation recommendation. Secretary Kiffmeyer said these could be the baseline for the work planned in the RFPs. McInerny can start by looking over this information before finalizing the RFPs. Bert Black said the task force can start writing the framework of the RFP and, just before publication of the notice, it could make a decision about the number of counties and groups that have to be included in the survey. McInerny said we have the skills and knowledge represented in the task force to make selections about the counties in the pilots or as a sample for the surveys. Secretary Kiffmeyer noted the business process is more important to understand than the status quo of technology expertise and resources. Paul McGinley said the task force should also look into how a survey of GIS usage could be a piece of this, since then the task force could put to use some of the federal funds that may become available. McInerny will draft a RFP for conducting the surveys, which the executive committee will review next Wednesday afternoon, 14 November. Any other task force members who can attend would be welcome. The goal is publish the RFP on 26 November. Bert Black will check the details on publication in the state register. The executive committee could delay the publication of the RFP, based on what it learns from a review of the draft. Mark Monacelli said that the recorders will meet to make some recommendations about counties that could be sites of the pilots. They will report at the next meeting. 11. Expense form and payment process of ERER expenditures McInerny will publish a revised expense form on the web site by next week. 12. Opportunity for interns Bert Black reported that the legal subcommittee needs more specific directions before it could reasonably define any opportunities for an intern. This might be more feasible later in the project. 13. Next meetings The task force is currently meeting the 2nd Thursday of each month. Its next formal meeting is November 19th at 9:00 and another on scheduled for 13 December, at 9.30. The executive committee and any others that can attend will meet next Wednesday afternoon, the 14th from 1:00pm to 2:30pm in Secretary Kiffmeyers office to review the draft RFP. McInerny will try to get vendors such as InGeo and Hart to speak at the December meeting. 14. Adjournment Secretary Kiffmeyer adjourned the meeting at 3.20.
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