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How did the storm huh Land? Sonoma County a diverse county of over one million acres is famed for its agriculture industry and recreation boasting a booming economy and a unique lifestyle for its citizens described by the famed Luther Burbank as the chosen spot

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of all the earth. Sonoma County is the place to live, work and play as we move into the 21st century. Led by the forward looking philosophy of its governing bodies. Sonoma County's 340,000 residents are a harmonious, successful blend of ethnic and economic backgrounds. We invite you

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to take a closer look at Sonoma County in the nineties with your host Rich McGlinchey. How you doing everybody? Welcome to another edition of Sonoma County in the 90s on this particular program, we're going to be talking about the Sonoma County Recorder's office. Originally we had

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planned to have the county recorder herself and one of her staff members, one of her lieutenants. Unfortunately Bernice could not be here. I'll let Steve tell us about that in a moment. But steve Lehman, the supervising document recorder, is our guest for this program. Let me

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give you a little background about steve himself. Steve Lehman is a supervising document recorder. He's a graduate of Sonoma State University and also a graduate of the Attorney Assistant program at S S. You. He's currently the chair of the documentary transfer tax subcommittee for the county

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recorder's Association of California. He's president of the Windsor historical society and until recently served as a member of the regional parks advisory commission representing the fourth supervisorial district. He served there for over four years, two of those years, he was chair of the commission steve has

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worked for the recorder's office for 11 years and high steve. It's nice to be here. What about Bernice? Bernice is very sorry she couldn't be here today. She was feeling ill on monday. Thought she would be better on Tuesday was hoping that she she rested on

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Wednesday. She'd be here today on Wednesday. She called. And I'll be honest, I didn't even recognize her voice when she called me was until about halfway through the conversation, it dawned on me. I was talking to my boss. She is sick. It's nothing too serious. But

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she would is not able to be here trying to talk right? No, she wouldn't be able to speak at all. I'm afraid. Let's get into the subject of the county recorder's office. Now we've talked with Bernice and some of your other associates over there a few

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times about the recorder's office. Not for quite some time. And I really think that people ought to know more about the recorder's office than they know. So maybe you can fill us in. Why don't you tell us what you do at the county recorder's office? Sure

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it's it's very often is misunderstood what we do there. But the idea the recorder's offices to put and make public all the land records for the land in Sonoma County, it enables anybody that is going to have any kind of transaction. If they're going to buy

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land, if they're going to loan money based on the property To come into an office, our office and know exactly what kinds of encumbrances are against the property, who owns the property, who has any interest in the property and maybe that it's unique to any other

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kind of archive. We keep everything and it's always available. All the information starting back in 1837 through this morning is available to the public right now. That's great. Well actually without your office, in that case, people would be buying property or leasing property or anything, they

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would be doing with property would be done blind. If it weren't for you folks, that's exactly right, it would be chaos. It would be virtually impossible to conduct business and real estate. It sure would be the recorder's office. Can any kind of a document be recorded?

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No. And just the other day, somebody, uh, an attorney asked me that same question and if I always think that if anybody knew the answer to that, it would be the attorneys, the documents have necessarily documents are prescribed by law. They're all, they're allowed to be

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recorded based on a statute that allows them to be recorded. There are hundreds of statutes that, that allow hundreds of various documents. Generally, there's a catch all phrase that if the document deals in real property and it is signed by the owner of the real property,

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then it can be recorded, The signature of that person has to be recorded so that there's a verification that that owner is in fact the owner of the property and has that right? But 15, 20 years ago somebody snuck a song by us because they thought

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that since we were the recorder's office that they ought to be able to record a song. So somewhere in the records there's actually a song. But generally it was, it was a terrible song. It was a terrible song. No, don't, don't, please don't, don't take offense

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at that. We don't know the person might be out there. So documents basically that deal with property or your now how about other, what do you call a statistic. That's right. We have the birth, death and marriage records for all those events that occurred in Sonoma

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County and we make them available to, to anybody that needs them. It's essentially an arm of the state. So we, the desk that provides that services as an extension of the office of the state registrar's office. When you say marriages and deaths and you're talking about

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the great joy and great tragedies of life. Yes. Our offices intertwined in everybody's lives and we were reminded of that every day. People come in for most of the time. It's, it's, it's for good news and for good events. But very often it's uh, we're involved

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in people's tragedies as well. It's well over the years, I've come over. uh, even before you can remember the recorder's office and I was always amazed at the documents in the records of things that you had in that office. It's really, we're going back to Wednesday

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discovered several years ago. The London, Jack London's house plans originally, I think it is, that's very popular document. The originals are on display in the office. We have classrooms come in just to look at them. It's quite a bit of history. Stephen, we know what kind

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of documents can be recorded can be recorded, I should say who actually uses the county recorder's office. Just about everybody at some time is going to use the use the records. The principal users are of course the title companies because they're the private industry that is

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dealing with the land records for people that are buying and selling property engineers and surveyors are in, uh, do a lot of research work. They need to establish, uh, points for their surveys when they're, when they're out looking for pa property line's. Genealogists are in the

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office doing work looking for the family history historians are in the office all the time. We have historians for the Jacqueline in house. They're looking at a while ago. There was a project that involved whether or not the fire was intentional or if it was arson.

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And, and or accidental. And so we had people looking at those plans to see if they could help reconstruct the house and determine what it was from. So we have everybody from the soccer coach needing to get a birth certificate so their kids can go play

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too. To the historians looking at one thing that comes to mind aside from what questions have jotted down to ask you here several years ago, Bernice was instructed I guess by law or by the county to get rid of all those great big books. They had

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all the hand, I have one of those, they have all the hand written records of 18 70 something. And when I have those were fascinating and the people in those days the recorder had to have good handwriting. Most of that was almost I think the chief

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requisite for being a recorder. Yeah. And it's interesting that good handwriting today is not good handwriting of yesteryear. And there are a couple of people That we're entering things in the index is back in the 1870s that had highly stylized handwriting and that's all we can

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do to to interpret anything they wrote, luckily we have typewriters got rid of several years ago. I was just asking about that thick and they were handwritten. All these legal findings or whatever the recorder puts in there about the property and that sort of thing was

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quite fascinating. Let's go back here and not digress too much here. What are your basic responsibilities in the recorder's office steve. Well the responsibilities in general of the recorder is to make sure that these records are kept accessible to the public immediately accessible, that we keep

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accurate indexes so that anybody that comes into the office is able to find the specific documents in a, in an orderly fashion, in a logical fashion. The index is the key without the index that the record is lost. And so we spent quite a bit of

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time ensuring that the indexes is exact. We have to be able to reproduce those documents for the public at any time. And as I mentioned earlier, we're able to reproduce a document that was recorded in 1837 as quickly as we can one that was recorded this

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afternoon. Um those records are fascinating. Every time I go over there, I'm fascinated by that office. The last time I spoke to Peterson, your office was I believe it was being remodeled now. Where are you with that now? Has that been completed or not? The physical

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remodeling is complete. The offices is a beautiful office. It's a real pleasure to work in it. The unique part of our technology is that it changes so fast that as soon as you establish 11 system or one method of, of keeping the records, technology changes and

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we have to keep up with it. Part of the book giveaway that you were mentioned earlier was because of our conversion that we, We're constantly having to convert the old records to something that's easier to store. Otherwise we'd simply run out of room you can't keep

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everything from 1837 without running out of room. So everything has been put on film. All the records are on film. And the next step is to take all the film records and digitize them and put them on on disks. And when we reach that stage there

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will be a whole another remodel at least of our electronic equipment in the office. So so it's constantly changing. And so it keeps it very exciting. It's amazing. It really is. What are some of the other, I know you're making other changes. What are some of

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the other changes that your office is making at present. We have two of the most recent changes. And I think a couple of the most exciting things that have changed in the office revolved around the vital statistic program. Uh when people come into an office they

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want they want immediate service. And when you have to find the record and I used to look it up in a paper index, open a book, find a reference, go to another paper book of that document, make a photocopy of it as the increase in the

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population and the increase in demand. It became impossible to be able to provide that service in the one day or while you wait. And so we've started a was authorized by the state. But we're able to abstract the information now off of a off a birth

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certificate, we simply keep that in the computer. So when somebody comes to the counter now and wants a copy of their birth certificate, we look it up in the index on the computer and were able to print an abstract right out of the database. And so

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there are occasions when people aren't in our office longer than 60 seconds, they step to the counter, ask for that. And as quick as they write the check their out, another part of that is the, we're able to accept requests over the phone. People can charge

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that on a Visa Mastercard. It's a service that's provided by a vendor out of state. There's a, there's a fee involved in that. But now folks, if you're the soccer coach and you live in Arizona now and you need that that record for the player to

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play in the tournament on the weekend, you could call us, we could prepare that record, put it in the mail, they can even charge the federal express charge and have that record overnight, something like that. Prior to that would take would probably a week and a

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half, two week process. So, so that's that's the nature of everything is to get it down to instantaneous service. It's what are some of the long term plans for the office steve. Well it would be the, it would be digitizing all all of our records and

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uh as soon as the, when we, when we purchase that system, which hopefully is gonna be within the next couple of years we will have all the records uh instead of having to go to film, we'll be able to look at them online on the computer

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terminal. They will uh the image will be stored on disk, just like the cd ROMs today and we will be connected with all the other offices in the county so that any other office would be able to have immediate access to the records also. And then

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ideally we would be able to provide that service to offsite users. So engineers, surveyors no longer come into the office, they simply pull this information up on their screen. The public gets much better service for the people that have to come in the office because the

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office is a lot less crowded. Everything should be quicker, exciting time. It's not as crowded as it used to be when I come over there. Now, it doesn't seem like anyway, it used to be in the old days, I mean it was things were slower. I'm

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thinking like 15, 20 years ago, things were a lot slower and sometimes it would be quite a little backup of folks there. But now people seem to just, it's part of the information and away they go. We're proud of the fact that we've kept on the

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edge of technology very well line up people in order to get recorded and through our use of technology, we've done a good job. I was just saying, these folks have done a good job. And uh over the years, uh, I know Bernice Peterson's been re elected

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recorder for forever. It seems like for quite a while, but it probably seems that long to her two times. But I know since he's been there, they've constantly upgraded the office and constantly sought to make uh everything they do a better service to the public. And

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I think that the public fundamentally has responded that I've heard many times. People say they enjoy going to the recorder's office. I haven't always heard that about some of our other county officers. But anyway, we're gonna pause right here for a moment steve uh, for a

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message from our station, but we'll be back in just a minute. We'll talk more about this. Ladies and gentlemen steve laymen and I, we'll return in just one moment. I have today signed an executive order providing for the establishment of a Peace Corps For 35 years.

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Peace Corps volunteers around the world have been helping people to help themselves when I joined the Peace Corps. It was because I wanted to teach, but I found out pretty quickly how much I had to learn the family that I'm placed with or that I live

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with have become my family. When I think about all the different, great experiences I've had here, they all seem to come down to one feeling and that's being completely alive and for all they put in, they come back with something even greater a commitment to service

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and solving problems right here at home Peace Corps for 35 years, changing America and changing the world. Hi, welcome back to this edition of Sonoma County in the nineties. We're talking to steve Lehman, he's the supervising document recorder for our Sonoma County Recorder's office. We have

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been talking about what the recorder's office does and some of the things they have been doing to upgrade their services and now we will carry out a little bit more about that. Bernice Peterson was going to be with us. But as steve said she with all

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due respect, Bernice sounded like a frog and we didn't even know who it was on the phone. So Bernice, we'll, we'll visit with you again soon. But now steve, let me ask you this. Bernice has been very active in the State association recorders in the state

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of California and also on the national level uh, run that bias. She has been very active and that's one of the reasons I think that her office has always been very progressive offices. She's been somebody that the entire office, I think it's always been proud to

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work for. She is the past president of the National Association of County Clerks and recorders and is and is still very active in that. She's been, she's a past president of the State Association of Recorders and is continues to chair a number of committees in that

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association and that's carried on to the, to the other members of the staff. Uh, she's from those associations, the, the idea of uniformity throughout the country and throughout the state has been very impressed the importance of it on us and we all try to carry that

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out. I think we started movement and make a record of the year nationally or something. She deserves it. She sure does. She's a nice lady and a very effective county recorder. Now, Bernice is involved in all those things. Are any member, other members of the staff

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involved in any of the state or national deals. Not at the national level, but Clara MacCulloch. The assistant recorder has also been very, very involved in the, at the state level. She's instrumental in writing a document, reference manual that's used throughout the state. Uh, as essentially

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the guide to to all the recorder's offices. She's currently the chair of a committee on indexing. And since indexing is the key to finding records, the committee is, is, is writing a manual on, on indexing so that that is uniform throughout the state. And this year

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I'm the, I'm sharing a transfer tax subcommittee. Good. So you're, you're getting involved in the state level. That's right. Okay. Now earlier on when we were giving your resume or your background some of the information about you individually. We talked about this, but what is a

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documentary transfer tax? Well, it's a part of the recording process that that is a little bit different than other uh, I think than other functions that you would expect in our office. But there's a tax do whenever properties conveyed and it usually catches people by surprise.

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It's it's in the past it's been widely interpreted throughout the state so that some counties virtually ignored it. Some have applied it, uh, not necessarily incorrectly, but perhaps not consistently. It's been a, it's been a source of a lot of discussion over the years. And so

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the committee was formed in order to to bring some coherency and consistency to the, to the policy and we've worked on it a couple of years and we have developed a book on that also. So that that includes interpretations of the law and court cases that

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have interpreted it. So it's we feel real good about that. We've, we've established a level of consistency throughout the state that I would say. So we talked about the fact that you have some terrifically old records in that in that office over there And you said

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they go back to 1837, That's right. What are some of the uh, well, we know that there's some births, marriages and deaths, some property. What else might we find over there? Well, back in 1837. What we have from that era is the uh it's the book

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of expedient A's and I'm sure I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, but it's the it's the Spanish method of keeping track of the land that involves the land around the the what was then the problem of Sonoma. It's all in spanish. And so it was essentially the beginning

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of time and recorded time anyway for Sonoma County. One of the most interesting records I think that I've ever seen down there and it's probably gonna it will probably be one of the most interesting records that have ever been recorded in the office is a declaration

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of emancipation. A gentleman that came out here in the 1850s, came out with his slave from Missouri. And in consideration of the time that he had spent with him in Missouri and apparently they had an agreement to work for him for two years in California. And

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so they recorded that that declaration. And When it first came up, it was uh it was stunning, stunning to read that document. It was that's quite a bit in advance of 1865. Yeah, it really is. And it's the idea that it was recorded in our office

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and that that document was then carried by that gentleman as his as his ticket to freedom. It was quite emotional document. How do you keep the records that you must keep without them getting too old and too fragile to use. I know films as part of

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this unless you said eventually disk. But uh do you have other records that you must protect that? You can't maybe copy right now. How do you handle that? It's kind of like triage I guess medically the again the books that you talked about when we gave

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those away were books that had already been transferred to film or had been copied into some of the medium and we no longer have the storage space for it. So those we didn't need to restore. And but we do have some books that that the the

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quality of the print is such that they we couldn't reproduce them on film. So those books have gone out to a company that restores those that type of record that's actually a company in Vermont. And they can they can take a page 150 year old page

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with ink on it and determine that the types of other materials on it. They use enzymes and washes and baths of a variety of of chemicals. And they can bring back the ink. They can wash off the old glue the oils that come off people's hands.

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And uh we have a beautiful, beautiful collection of those books in the bookcase that was built especially now to house them because we try to keep them uh away from just the random access that we also have a lot of maps on old on linen that

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in the same case they've over the years. They've just started to peel and curl and disintegrate and the same company has been able to restore them and bring them back. They're beautiful. We have most of them out for public viewing there behind plexiglass covers. But there

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to do some of the things you've mentioned earlier, like photography, you must have a photo lab of some kind. There we have a complete photo lab were able to, we film the records. That's how they become part of our permanent record now. So there's the filming,

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we process the film, we duplicate the film. We part of the storage of safekeeping is that the original is sent off to a vault in the cave in the sierra Nevada's as a matter of fact, but we have a very extensive photo lab. We have a

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relatively new supervisor of that department. Karen Lucas who has, who has been a tremendous asset to the, to the office. Many county departments help or serve other county departments. A lot of people don't know that but it's a very, very definite fact and it's a very

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important fact. Do you provide that service or any other service for other county departments? We had not passed, we had filmed only our own records but with the modernization of our micro graphics lab and under the supervision of of Karen, we've been able to branch out.

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So we have now conducted filming projects for a number of county number of county offices. The treasurer tax collector, the auditor's office, the sheriff's office, The new permit and resource management department. We're able to reduce everybody's paper now and put them on film and much much

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better for all the offices. And who does that? Who handles that? Who's in charge of doing that for you? Karen Lucas, the micro graphics department. She works out the arrangements with the other departments and yeah that's great that you're able to do that. Tell people we

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have about three minutes left to us. Tell people where you're located. Uh Exactly and then how they can get in touch with you by phone and so forth. Well the offices in the fiscal building where the 5 85 fiscal drive is the street address. It's the

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building we tell people on the phone. It's the building just a little bit south of the Hall of Justice in jail. And we use that as as the landmark generally around december. Everybody knows where we are when we tell them we're in the same building with

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a tax collector Also. Uh We're open from from 8 to 5 and were able to perform any of the services that we offer right up until five o'clock. Our phone number is 5 to 7 to 651. And always jokingly used to say that you were over

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in the fiscal building. It's located between the board of supervisors and the criminal justice system. In fact it's squeezed between budgetarily speaking to over the years. We all were um what ours is the office open 8 to 5. We're open from 8 to 5 about two

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years ago we tried to shorten the hours 2 to 4 30 because of the the enormous load of documents and we needed the ability to process those before five o'clock, but because of the technology that we have now that we're open straight through till five o'clock,

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so there is no limitation on that anymore. You know, One thing that comes to mind, I didn't have a job down to ask you, but uh nowadays what does it cost to get a marriage license or record a marriage license or record a birth or record

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uh In the good old days. And we still have people that come in with their with the bottom piece of paper that they got when their child was born that says return the slip filled out and get a certificate for $2. Uh $13 now. And for

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the longest time it was consistent throughout the state. But because of the attempt to generate funds whenever you can or wherever you can uh there's a there's a bill that's uh that just passed that's gonna raise it $3 in most counties, it won't go up statewide.

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It'll go up county by county. I don't believe we're gonna to our fees will raise this year. But they statewide they're anywhere from $13 to $19 right now. And you said earlier that people nowadays can come in and pay the fee and submit whatever it is

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they want recorded or get a copy of something has been recorded almost immediately. Right, right. It just, it just takes a minute. There's, there's, we're sensitive to when there's three people in line were worried that that's too long a line. Thank you buddy. Thanks for coming

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over to tell us about the recorder's office. I give our best to Bernice and it was really a pleasure having you here and and finding out about this. Ladies and gentlemen, the county recorder's office is probably one of the most important offices at the county complex,

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but it's probably one of the least understood many cases. So we've always had uh taken, I guess I should say joy and having released one of her lieutenants come over and talk about the recorder's office and what it does to serve you and me and believe

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me. That's a great deal. My name's Richmond, plenty the program. Sonoma County in the nineties. We'll be back with you next week with another member of the county government family or related agency until then. Good luck, good night and good help to each and every one

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of you. 23 just that. Yeah, town about to break down. Okay.