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State archivist urges legislative policy decision on land-records modernization
Summary
Tanya Marshall, state archivist and chief records officer, told the House Commerce & Economic Development Committee on Feb. 4 that Vermont has begun electronic land‑records reporting but that broader modernization — including whether the state should pursue a shared municipal system — requires policy direction from the Legislature.
Tanya Marshall, state archivist and chief records officer for the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration, told the House Committee on Commerce & Economic Development on Feb. 4 that the agency is managing a growing digital workload and that the next stage of land‑records modernization will require explicit legislative policy choices.
Marshall said the archives — a 20‑person office inside the Secretary of State’s office — operates three repositories (a State Records Center in Middlesex, a state archives vault and a digital archives) and supports roughly 500 records officers and liaisons across state and local government. “We have about 9 terabytes a session coming out between this and the videos,” she said, noting the legislature’s committee records are a major source of digital transfers.
The committee heard that Act 171 of 2022 created an overlay that allowed town clerks to begin electronic reporting and that the legislature appropriated roughly $2 million during the COVID period for towns to back‑scan records. Marshall said that effort addressed conversion of historic paper files but left several structural questions unresolved: multiple vendor systems, uneven municipal capacity and statutes that still direct many types of real‑property filings to local clerk offices.
Marshall summarized the options and risks the committee will face if it asks the state to pursue deeper modernization. She said some towns are too small to justify individual systems and would benefit from a multi‑jurisdiction or multi‑tenant enterprise approach; others have already invested in systems and could transition quickly. “If we had a multi‑town, multi‑jurisdiction system, that would get them over the hurdle,” she said. She also warned that large‑scale back‑scan programs carry authentication risks unless the state preserves technical provenance and audit trails.
Committee members pressed Marshall on public access, consumer protection and whether municipalities are within the committee’s remit. Marshall said centralized electronic reporting would improve the state’s ability to spot fraudulent filings and give property owners clearer visibility into records filed against their parcels. She cited the Act 68 appraisal report as a related development and said the two reports together support a broader policy review of “real property” information — including deeds, permitting, assessments and other records currently split among municipal and state offices.
Marshall described work the archives is already doing: targeted assistance staff for executive and judicial branches, an FTE focused on land‑records modernization, a boards and commissions registry, a program that helps municipal clerks with indexing and file conversion, and outreach with the Agency of Digital Services for enterprise repositories. She said the office can perform legislative research to show where new laws create recordkeeping obligations and where statutes might be streamlined.
The testimony closed with Marshall’s invitation for members to visit the Middlesex records center and with multiple lawmakers expressing interest in a coordinated, statewide policy approach rather than piecemeal fixes.
Marshall and committee members did not take any formal votes during the presentation; she identified policy choices that would require subsequent legislative direction if the committee wishes to pursue them.
