I recently ran across a story about county court records dilemma in Texas that had the Attorny General, Greg Abbott involved. Basically, a county courthouse was reluctant to allow certain access to property records and Attorney General Greg Abbott order them to update their systems so their technology is current and on par with the rest of society.
It all started when a company based in Houston, Texas known as Integrity Title Records, tried to obtain land records from Hidalgo County. The company provides access to an online database for its customers and was trying to obtain an electronic index of the county’s title records, digital copies of each physical record, and the associated maps.
The clerk’s office in Hidalgo county initially denied the request. Here’s the funny part: they claimed that the USB ports, necessary for transferring the data onto to Integrity’s drives, were disabled. This was apparently due to the county’s security policy and that of the records vendor for the county, which barred the attachment of additional hardware to the leased computers.
Wait…it gets better. Instead of simply allowing the operation, which would have cost $0.00, and taken about 4 hours, the clerk’s office offered to copy the title records onto more than 1,000 CD’s at a cost of $87,430. That’s a whopping $87 per CD. They must have either been extremely irate at the company or figured, what the heck, let’s give it a shot. By the time I got this far, I was almost rolling on the floor from laughing so hard.
Of course, Integrity became upset and filed a cost complain with Attorney General Abbott’s office in August of 2009. Earlier this month, Abbott ruled that a USB drive is a storage device like a CD or a DVD, also noting that the county did in fact routinely use CD’s. My guess is that they were charging $87 or so per CD, and that most people only needed 1 or 2 CD’s. This way the issue never came up because it just wasn’t worth complaining about, but it was a money maker for the county.
“By refusing to furnish the information to the requestor in the requested medium of a USB drive on the basis of an agreement entered into by the county clerk with ACS, or a security policy adopted by the county clerk that requires disabling of the USB ports on the county clerk’s computers, the county clerk has failed to comply with section 552.268 of the Government Code,” wrote the attorney general.
The long and short is that if the county’s computers do not have USB drives installed, they must take the necessary steps to install them. I have no doubt their computers have USB drives and that they function just fine. What boggles my mind is that they would be so ridiculous about the whole thing. Oh well, we’ll know for next time, that’s all.
