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County clerk seeks part-time hire to index 365,000 legacy land records rather than pay outside vendor
Summary
The Kerr County clerk told the Commissioners Court the county has roughly 365,000 documents in an unsearchable field dating to 1986 and asked to add a dedicated part-time employee to index records by property description rather than hire an outside contractor with a roughly $500,000 price tag.
The county clerk told the commissioners the office needs a part-time position to index legacy land records that are not searchable by property description after a system migration and said contracting the work would be far more expensive.
The county clerk said about "365,000 documents out there that need to be reviewed, and it goes back to 1986," and proposed hiring a part-time person dedicated to indexing those records by property description so the public can search by parcel rather than only by owner name.
Nut graf: The clerk explained the problem stems from a prior migration in which property descriptions were stored in a non-searchable field; the vendor Fiddler (the company that provided the county's previous land system) quoted a much higher cost to remediate the issue, which the clerk said could exceed half a million dollars. The clerk requested a lower-cost in-house part-time solution to complete the work over time.
The clerk said land-department staff are handling current filings but cannot dedicate full time to retroactive indexing without adding capacity. The part-time hire would not assist other customer-facing county-clerk functions; the position would focus on remediating historical indexing to make records accessible through the county's case-management system.
Ending: The court considered the request during the workshop and did not approve new hires at this session; the clerk will continue to work with county staff on options and budget impact for a part-time position or vendor remediation.
