The following is a presentation of FCB Faith. This is Keeping America First with Bishop John T. Coates and Reverend Jeff Jemison on FCB Faith. Welcome to Keeping America First and we have an exciting guest. All of our guests are exciting and just share great information. This morning, today we have Mike Duran. Mike Duran is the county recorder for the great. County of Lorain, Ohio. Mike, how are you today? Glad to have you. I'm doing well. I know you've done. Some great things. You're in your second term, I believe, right? Yeah, this is my second term. Okay. Mike, a lot of good things are happening in the great county of Lorain. And I know you've done a great job as county recorder. Could you talk about some of the things that you've done? So one of the big pushes is we wanted to push to. Digitize a lot of our records because we had a lot of them digitized. We have almost all of them done right now. The only holdup is we're still getting some of them that we have imaged, indexed. So they're all available and online. We're just in the process of making them easier to search because right now It's, uh, you're online, but it's more like. The index is like searching through an old index book and everybody doesn't know how to do that. And we want to make it so that it's accessible for everybody who can use a computer and type in a name to be able to search for even those old property records from the old P1800s back to 1824. Tell us, uh, you know, a lot of my listeners are probably wondering what does the county recorder do and what's the importance of the county recorder's job? Could you tell us a little bit about, uh, the job and just what the county recorder does and how important it is for us. All right, so let's start with importance. One of the first offices to start when we came over here to America, they had to establish who was owning what property, who owned this piece of land, who owned those acreages and everything like that. So in order to know who owns it so that A, the court can determine if somebody's trespassing on your land or if somebody's building something on your land that they're not supposed to. Or let's say you want to take out a mortgage, you want the bank to be able to, you want to mortgage your property over to the bank. So in order to prove that you own that property or for the bank to be able to actually take it from you if you don't pay them back on their mortgage, you want to be able to prove who owns that property. So The county recorders are a very important part of the entire economy and how everything starts with. A lot of times you don't see what we're doing, you don't know what we're doing, but we're keeping everything safe. In the background. My particular office has records going back to 1824. That includes your deeds and your mortgages. We have some other things that we had to, like we did unemployment reports. things, uh, unemployment, uh, liens and stuff like that for a little while used to be kept in a separate area. Um, we used to do business filings like UCC with, so we still sue UCCs. Um, we used to do, uh, there, there used to be more. Specific UCCs that were actually like, we used to file a lot more UCCs, but then we sent a lot of that up to the state, but it's still a lot of basically keeping properties safe and then one of the things that we do to keep your property safe so that just anybody. Comes in and tries to. Transfer a deed or something like that, because we've had some property fraud. It's more so in other states, but there is some here as well where somebody will try and do it. We do have a property fraud alert system, which. You'll take your name and you'll put it in the system. And if somebody transfers something, on your name, you'll go ahead and get an email notification. So that way, you know that something happened right away and you can actually go in there and take care of it quickly instead of finding out in six. Months or a year or 10 years down the road. Yeah, that's interesting. I actually had a friend of mine, someone call me and share an instance with me where there was a property that I guess it is set vacant for quite some time. And someone came along and quit claimed it to themselves and then started renting it out. Is that something that can be done? That is something. Is that something that can be, is that legal? It's not legal. No, it's not something that can legally be done. And that is why we encourage people to sign up for the alert me or, you know, the alert me property alert system. It's a free system that we offer through the county. There are some places also that offer like a protect your property from scams thing that they charge you every month and they say it'll cover you up to $ 10 million or whatever. And that'll be like a monthly fee of like 10 or 15 or 20 bucks a month now probably. I don't know exactly how much it is. I. I'm not saying that those are bad things to have because it might be right for some people to want to pay that $ 20 a month, but our service is. Just free and it still lets you know. It just doesn't have that like insurance style aspect of if something happens, we'll pay you money. It's more of the, if something happens, we'll let you know. And if you find out sooner, it's going to cost less and be easier to take care of than if you find out in six months or in 10 years. So you're saying that this is a free service that you offer? Yeah, yeah. Free service right on our website. You just sign up. I wonder how many people, what percentage of the population of homeowners are actually aware of this, because that's something I've never heard of, a service like that being free. Seems like everyone would take advantage of that. Yeah, so we try to get it out there in advertisement, but we don't quite have the advertising budget that the big companies have that are selling it because they're obviously making money off of it for the advertising. Right, you've got to watch your budget and everything. I understand that. Yeah, that's a great service. Now, I will ask you this. Is this something that's offered across the state, or is this pretty much something that's been very innovative coming out of your offices? This is something that the majority of the county recorders are going to have. It just might be called something different and it might be in a different spot on their website because we're not all, we're not, we all fall, we're all under the Ohio revised code and we all have to follow the same laws, but we're all, we're all elected. We're all individuals. So we each put our own little design. On it or our counties might do things a little bit differently because we're still a different part of the county government. But the same idea is it's not, It's not. Required by law for your county to have it, but off the top of my head, I can't think of which counties don't have it. So it's a big majority of the counties in the state do have something like this. Even I'd almost argue. Counties in the country, because I do go to some organizations of county recorders that would be across the state so that we can figure out what kinds of things that we can do to better serve the public. So have you found or heard of any cases like that, similar to the one I just mentioned to you where They're vacant properties or properties that have just been sitting for quite some time and that are in need of repair. And then someone comes along and says, you know, they could claim it to themselves and either fix it up, possibly. Rent it out. We don't see these. We don't hear about these a lot in our office. So I'm not saying that they don't happen ever or that they don't happen in our county, but As for the ones that do come to our office, if somebody goes to the court, they'll send a subpoena to my office and say, Hey, you have to come to court and then we'll send it to the prosecutor's office. Hey, do we really have to go to court? We, we can just send the papers in or send a representative from the prosecutor's office. Cause it's not a, like identifying the person who happened, but, um, there's one particular instance I can remember where someone, the landowner had died. And the property was transferred shortly thereafter under a quick claim deed. And then the heirs noticed that that. Was, uh, that it was up for sale and they're like, what's going on. This is grandpa's, you know, land or whatever, trying to remember. So usually more, more often than not. It's actually somebody that's close to the property or close to the family. That is taking these kinds of things. So like, let's say. Your uncle takes you hunting on this land and you think that he should give it to you. He dies and he didn't write it to you in the will. So then you think nobody in the family knows and notices about it and sit here and try and scam the system. But that's more of what we see. Um, then some, then some stranger coming in from somewhere else and, and taking the property, even though I have seen that happening, happening a little more so in, um, like in southern ohio like in not in a really southern but like dayton they were they were having some issues with. That uh a couple years ago they were talking. About like people would go in and quit claim an apartment complex to themselves. So what happens in a case like that does that go to probate court does that go to housing court uh Does that go to a common police court? How does that work? Yeah, that would actually be a that would be a criminal offense. And that would go through the it would go through the sheriff's department to go through the prosecutors or it would go through the city if it was actually. In a in a in a city's area. Talk about your being accessible, your office being accessible to citizens and some other things that you're doing. I mean, that property fraud is a big issue, but talk about some other things that your office does and you're being accessible. Okay, so as for accessibility, it goes back to the digitizing of the documents and making everything available online 24 hours a day. When When we first came into this office, you had people that were in the back searching all the time because they're title examiners. So they're working for the public as well. I mean, they're getting paid from the transaction of the fee, but they're going on there, going through the bank and making sure that the person owns the property that they can go through and actually take out a loan or actually be able to transfer and sell this to somebody else. So we'd have these title examiners. When I first came in here, you'd probably have. About 40 to 50 people in that back room per day. And now with everything being accessible and online, not only can the public actually access this online, but the title examiners have an easier job going. Now we still have about five or six people that do come back there every day because there's some stuff that's a little bit harder to see online. And as I find out more stuff that's, well, as I find out ways to make those more accessible, then less people will be back there But there are still some people who like the old ways of doing it, like the feel of the paper. And our office is open for that, too. If you like the feel of the paper and you just want to go in and look through that list of names and see that cursive handwriting, then you can come in here during our hours. And anybody from the public can come back here and search for whether they're trying to research their own property. Or maybe somebody wants to see... genealogically, because if your family was from Lorraine or Elyria or Amherst, and you come in here and you want to see what properties your family owned and get the document, take a picture of it and send it back to your family. Tree, or we can even do copy service. We, it's like $ 2 a page for a copy. So it's not even that much, but I mean, if you want a hundred copies, you can, you know, try and print them online as well for free. So that's, uh, yeah. Well, Mike Durant, um, How about other services? My understanding was that your office was actually out in the community holding meetings or I guess sessions for the public to entertain questions or talk to you at maybe libraries. Yeah, definitely. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, we've been out doing, we were doing some library tours and we've been doing different tours of senior citizen centers and different places that we can go to. Um, we will go out there and we'll announce if we're going to go to a library, we'll say, Hey, we're going to go to the library. We're going to talk about our office and what we do. And then anybody can ask anything. And if we have veterans in there, we let everybody know the services we do for veterans, which is, uh, we keep their DD two 14s recorded and accessible to them, but those are not a public record. So only the veteran can actually come in and get their own, or if they're deceased, then they're, um, their next of kin can come in and get that record until they become public record 75 years after they're actually recorded. What other services do you provide for veterans? For veterans, it would be the recording of the DD-214 as well as the veteran ID card, which is not to be confused with the VA card because the VA has their own card. And if you need VA services, you definitely have to get that from them. But if somebody doesn't have VA benefits and they want to be able to identify themselves as a veteran, that they can come in and. Get our card. It's good for identifying yourself if a place wants to, that gives discounts to veterans or those kinds of things without having to pull out your DD-214 that has your social security number and all your information on it. We just have a little ID card that has your face on it and your address, date of birth and address. A couple other informations about where you served, but it doesn't have your social security number on it or anything else that you wouldn't want to share with the guy at Starbucks to get a discount for being a veteran. County Recorder Mike Duran, thank you for sharing with us today. Thank you for being a guest on our show, Keeping America First. Lastly, if anyone wants to get in contact with you or your office, what's the best way? All right. So our website's lorainecountyrecorder.gov. And our phone number is 440-329-5148. All right. Thank you again for being with us today. Enjoy the rest of this day, the summer. And keep doing, keep fighting a good fight. And keep making America best for all of us.
