(Spirit Lake)– County Recorders throughout Iowa are advocating for an increase in fees for documents they provide. Dickinson County Recorder Ann Ditsworth is Vice President of the Iowa County Recorder’s Association. She says 1985 is the last time those fees were adjusted…
“Currently our fees are our first page is seven dollars and five dollars for each additional page. So if you bring a 10 page mortgage in, it costs 52 dollars. We’ve done a survey around the country but especially in the Midwest and Iowa is at the lowest.”
Ditsworth says they’re seeking a flat rate of ten dollars per page. She says they plan to present their proposal to state lawmakers in the upcoming legislative session, adding that they’ve already been in talks with stakeholders…
“The Bank Association, the Bar Association, Iowa Land Title, the surveyors. Those are the four main entities but there’s some others as well like some I T organizations that we work with. We’ve been talking with each of them and they can see where we’re coming from. 1985 was an awful long time ago.”
Ditsworth says the increase is needed to help meet added expenses of digitizing documents, especially those pertaining to real estate through the Iowa Land Records E-submission program…
“That is a very costly thing to maintain because I T costs. You know this. And everybody knows it. And so because we need to continue to sustain that and it is a statewide resource, we can look at the, or not vital records, real estate records from throughout the state. 23 million records are currently on file at Iowa Land Records that you can access with a simple sign in password. Anyone can access it, it’s our public records. It’s like going into the vault of all of our counties right there. It doesn’t mean that every county has every record there because not everyone is fortunate enough to have everything in digital format, but 23 million is an awful lot of records. So basically it’s everything forward is going digital and many have gone back a long ways.”
Ditsworth says they’ve already been meeting with some legislative subcommittees.
