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Town clerks warn HB 7255 redaction mandate could be costly and technically infeasible without vendor changes
Summary
The Connecticut Town Clerks Association and municipal clerks told the Judiciary Committee that Section 1 of HB 7255 — which would require agencies to redact certain personal information from online records — raises major technical, cost and operational questions for municipalities that post decades of land records online.
Town clerks and municipal officials told the Judiciary Committee that a proposal to require public‑agency redaction of personal information from online records would pose major operational and cost challenges for municipalities that have digitized decades of land and municipal records.
Lisa Dalton, first vice president of the Connecticut Town Clerk's Association and Watertown town clerk, told the committee the association objects to Section 1 of HB 7255 as written. "There are many complexities to what may seem like the simple process of merely clicking here and there to remove personal information such as an address from a record," Dalton said. She explained that many towns publish land records online going back decades, and municipal vendors do not currently provide bulk redaction tools that identify and remove every instance of a protected individual's address across indexed documents.
"HB 7255 not only affects land records, it also includes other municipal records such as video, social media, and audio meeting minutes," Dalton said. She urged formation of a task force to study other jurisdictions' redaction processes and vendor capabilities rather than imposing immediate operational requirements. Municipal clerks said a requester would likely need to supply exact volume and page references for records to ensure accurate redaction.
Peter Smith, city clerk of Milford and a member of the CTCA legislative committee, told the panel that local vendors support online access but currently lack a turnkey redaction feature. "We did have an initial meeting [with the Judicial Branch]. Several dozen concerns were raised, and the next time there was communication back from Judicial was when the bill was released," Smith said. He described municipalities' multi‑vendor environment and warned that adding redaction functionality would be a nontrivial procurement and cost issue for many towns.
Clerks asked the committee to consider a study process, vendor consultations and a longer timetable before imposing broad redaction duties on municipal recordholders.
What happens next: Clerks urged additional stakeholder meetings with the Judicial Branch and proposed a task force study of redaction technology and costs; committee members asked clerks to follow up with their vendors and report back before committee deadlines.
