Davis County recorder seeks assistant, tech upgrades to tackle 450,000-document backlog

Dakota Worth, Davis County chief deputy recorder, told the Budget Committee the recorder’s office will ask for funding in the 2026 budget for a confidential administrative assistant and several technology upgrades intended to improve public access and help the office process a backlog of older records.

Worth said the office has seen revenue volatility — peaking in 2021, dipping in 2023 and modestly recovering in 2024 — and that year-to-date revenue was about 5% higher than the prior year. “So much of our revenue stream is outside of our control,” Worth said, “it’s dependent on market volume and recorded documents that come through the office.”

The office’s main budget request is for an administrative assistant to preserve institutional knowledge ahead of two anticipated retirements whose combined service the presenter estimated at about 41 years. Worth said the base salary for the position would be about $65,000; a committee member flagged a loaded-benefits figure given in the meeting transcript that appears garbled and was not confirmed on the record.

Worth also updated the committee on a one-time restoration project for historic county documents and said the office may request a budget amendment if current bids require additional funding. He proposed a two-phase fee schedule revision — a narrow ordinance-based change effective Jan. 1 followed by a broader review of services outside statute to improve cost recovery in the following budget year; Worth said the fee schedule was last revised in “01/15.”

To increase access and revenue, Worth described plans to expand subscription access through Ready Web and combine it with property-search functions so more imaged but currently unindexed documents (many pre-1980) can be sold online. “That should aid in our cost recovery efforts,” he said.

Committee members pressed on staffing and timing. Worth said the office does not plan to backfill several recorder-tech positions expected to be vacated by retirement, intending instead to redeploy trained staff, use attrition savings and rely on the new assistant during a transition. He described a processing strategy that pairs staff retraining with a document-processing program and limited use of AI models to improve throughput while preserving a human final-review step.

Presenters described a backlog of about 450,000 unprocessed documents and said the staff can use the backlog to train models and improve efficiency. One participant noted current OCR/AI accuracy rates for modern documents are “in the nineties” (reported as roughly 92–93%), while older documents reach the high 80s; presenters stressed accuracy and final human review remain necessary.

The committee discussed whether the administrative assistant’s salary should be prorated in 2026 if hired midyear, and members agreed to follow up after a later-afternoon meeting to firm timing and costs. Officials also discussed reassigning revenue currently managed by IS (information services) for Ready Web/property search to the recorder’s office; the chair said the county would seek to move that revenue in 2025 or, if not feasible, begin the transition in 2026 to ensure revenue is recorded where the data owner resides.

The committee did not take a formal vote on any motion during the recorded presentation; presenters were invited to return with refined cost estimates and a potential ordinance fee change timeline.