For the Record: The Unique Success Story of the GSCCCA

FOR THE RECORD

THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA G E O R G I A S U P E R I O R C O U RT C L E R K S ’ C O O P E R AT I V E AU T H O R I T Y

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he Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority is arguably one of the most unique organizations in the country. While other states provide some of the same services, few agencies offer as many, as efficiently, and at no cost to taxpayers.

In the beginning, it was the vision and will of a handful of Superior Court clerks that convinced their colleagues across the state to sign on to a new way of doing things . . . convincing them that they would not only become more efficient and better serve the citizens of Georgia, but they would retain control of their vital documents and maintain their revenue in the process. Later, it was a different vision that guided the Authority’s operations: the vision and commitment to continually improve current services and develop and offer new ones for the benefit of Superior Court clerks and the citizens of Georgia.

From the game-changing “first fax” in 1995 to the Authority of 2014, the organization has come a long way, indeed, today managing a variety of innovative projects and hosting a website that is accessed thousands of times daily as end users seek invaluable information. Granted, the road from then to now has

not always been easily traveled.

There were political battles to be won, oldschool clerks to be convinced, and technology challenges to be overcome. Key to traversing the roadblocks and guiding the evolution were the Authority’s three progressive chairmen and their respective boards.

And all would agree that the board’s best asset was its unflappable director, the late David Williams, who joined the Authority early on and earned the respect of everyone who came into his circle.

For the Record: The Unique Success Story of the GSCCCA tells all these stories and more.

It’s not just the history of a state agency. It’s the story of a collective vision being realized through the selfless commitment of many. It’s the story of innovation, collaboration and leadership. And in the end, it’s the story of how government can and should work.

1875 Century Blvd • Atlanta, GA 30345

THE GEORGIA SUPERIOR COURT C L E R KS ’ CO O PE R ATI V E AU T H O R IT Y

D E D I C A T I O N

David R. Williams January 19, 1959 – July 22, 2014

This book is dedicated to the memory of David Williams, who was the heart and soul of the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority for nineteen years. Even before he was tapped as executive director, he was the clerks’ biggest champion, advocating tirelessly for them and the work they do every day. He was a treasured and respected leader, a true friend, and a great man. His passion for his work was contagious, and his dedication to the Georgia Superior Court clerks will be irreplaceable. The Authority’s story is his story and legacy in so many ways. The Authority is proud to be able to share it in his honor.

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GEORGIA SUPERIOR COURT C L E R KS ’ CO O PE R ATI V E AU T H O R IT Y F O R T H E R E C O R D — T H E U N I Q U E S U C C E S S S T O R Y O F T H E G S C C C A

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The Jasper County Confederate Monument stands prominently near the historic Jasper County Courthouse, which was built in the city of Monticello in 1907.

The building’s hallmark is its hexagonal cupola clock tower. c

GEORGIA SUPERIOR COURT C L E R KS ’ CO O PE R ATI V E AU T H O R IT Y F O R T H E R E C O R D — T H E U N I Q U E S U C C E S S S T O R Y O F T H E G S C C C A

Copyright 2014 © Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from GSCCCA.

THE

CLERKS

AUTHORITY

Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority

1875 Century Blvd Atlanta, GA 30345 Amy Meadows Author Rob Levin Editor Carole Fischbein Project Coordinator Rick Korab Design Tom England and Frank Niemeir New Photography Renée Peyton Production Manager Bob Land Copyediting Dave Baker Proofreading Shoshana Hurwitz Indexing

Book Development by Bookhouse Group, Inc. Covington, Georgia

This real estate deed recorded and filed in Jasper County on May 5, 1808, is one of the many public documents entrusted to the Georgia Superior Court clerks.

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The GSCCCA introduced the Georgia Consolidated Plat Index in January 2004, allowing citizens to search public plat records. The online searchable database ultimately will include such historical plat records as the one pictured here, which was filed in Baldwin County on November 10, 1806. f

T A B L E

O F

C O N T E N T S

PROLO GU E IX

CHAPTER ONE

Change Is Coming 1

CHAPTER TWO

The Road to Your Courthouse Door Is Going to Be Electronic 31

CHAPTER THREE

It’s a Success Story 47

I NDE X 56 g

The seal and the full name of the GSCCCA are displayed proudly in the organization’s headquarters in Atlanta.

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R

O

L

O

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U

E

What’s in a Name?

Any member of the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority (GSCCCA) will concede that the organization has a very long name. However, while the moniker is a mouthful, the selection of every word was deliberate. Each one is important. Each one has meaning. Each one is there for a reason.

And together, those six words not only describe what the organization is but also help tell a story that began more than two decades ago.

At its core, the story of the GSCCCA is about a diverse group of people from across the state who came together to work toward a common—and

seemingly

impossible—

goal. The determination they exhibited was unparalleled, and the success they achieved was unprecedented in America. Their collective vision and tenacity led to the creation of a unique government entity that, today, is as efficient as it is innovative and impactful.

There is no other organization like the GSCCCA in the United States. Working with and for the elected Superior Court clerks of Georgia’s 159 counties, the Authority is a pioneer in the realm of government. Its history is laudable, and its name stands as a testament to the true power of cooperation.

Woodson Daniel, the first chairman of the GSCCCA, served as the Superior Court clerk of Pulaski County for nearly four decades.

His foresight and ingenuity helped guide the development of the GSCCCA, and his early leadership allowed the organization to grow and thrive in a way that exceeded expectations. j

GEORGIA SUPERIOR COURT C L E R KS ’ CO O PE R ATI V E AU T H O R IT Y F O R T H E R E C O R D — T H E U N I Q U E S U C C E S S S T O R Y O F T H E G S C C C A

C H A P T E R

O N E

Change Is Coming I

It was the late 1980s, and Woodson Daniel, Superior Court clerk of Pulaski County, was trying to keep up with

the growing workload in his office. He worked seven days a week, often late into the night, filing and indexing everything from Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) statements to real estate deeds. All of the filing and indexing had to be done by hand. More than one hundred miles away in McDuffie County, recently elected Superior Court clerk Connie Cheatham faced the same time-consuming process, working with her staff to index UCCs manually, writing down debtors’ names and secured party names in large, cumbersome books that sat on a desk waiting to be searched by attorneys, bankers, and other professionals. At the same time, Dan Jordan, Superior Court clerk of Jasper County, was using a typewriter to fill out forms with carbon copies and enter case numbers onto tiny strips of adhesive paper that would then be placed in the bulky index books. These same scenes were being repeated in Superior Court clerks’ offices throughout the state’s 159 counties every day, as the diligent custodians of Georgia’s public records worked tirelessly to make those documents readily available to the citizens who entrusted them with the job.

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CHAPTER ONE—CHANGE IS COMING

In many cases, the way a Superior Court clerk’s office operated was based on tradition.

Newly elected clerks frequently adopted the systems of their predecessors. This general lack of change, which often was simply due to insufficient resources, unfortunately had a consequence. For many years, said Daniel, “The clerks became known for being against things that represented progress.” Some even considered the clerks of Superior Court to be “the dinosaurs of Georgia’s court system.”

However, that situation was about to change.

By the early 1990s, “I saw the need to be more progressive and aggressive and to become known for things that we didn’t have to do to be better at our jobs,” said Daniel, who was not alone in his desire to alter the perception of the Superior Court clerks of Georgia. In In the past, real estate deeds were recorded and filed away in large books that were stored in local courthouses throughout the state. Although the public documents are now searchable online thanks to the GSCCCA, those historic books are still available for review at locations like the Newton County courthouse.

fact, during the last decade of the twentieth century, those 159 constitutional county officers banded together not only to change their reputation but also to revolutionize

public records management for the entire state. Today, that system remains unique in America.

The charge for change initially began in 1990 when F. Barry Wilkes, Superior Court clerk of Liberty County, spearheaded the effort to create the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia, a formal state agency established by statute that serves as the official representative of Superior Court clerks to other state agencies. Its central function is to assist the clerks in the execution of their duties while giving them power in the decision-making process on issues that affect their offices. As the inaugural president of the council, Wilkes led strategic planning sessions that included discussions about short-term and longterm goals for the clerks. “I realized we would never be able to make any progress, technologically or otherwise, if we didn’t do something for ourselves,” Wilkes explained. “Through the exchange of ideas, we had consensus that we had to change the status quo, because if we didn’t, we probably wouldn’t survive very long.”

As it happened, a movement was under way at the time to have the clerks become appointed officials instead of elected. Then the search was 2

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

on to find a way to ensure that Georgia’s Superior Court clerks would be able to do their jobs effectively while controlling their own destiny, which included finding a mechanism that would allow them to improve their office resources with funding apart from county and state appropriations. This search ultimately led to the development of the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority.

Seizing an Opportunity: The UCC Project Woodson Daniel, who was elected to office in 1961, had strong connections in a variety of professional arenas. In late 1992, he learned that the banking industry was preparing to approach the Georgia General Assembly about the fact that Georgia was one of the only states in the nation that did not have a central filing system for Uniform Commercial Code statements. The issue was highly important to bankers, who saw their institutions losing money because of the state’s outdated method for filing financing statements associated with secured property. UCCs for everything from farming equipment to crops had to be filed in the clerk’s office in the county where the property was physically located.

The system, however, did not provide statewide recognition of that lien, and if the secured property— such as a tractor—was moved, finding out if a lien even existed was nearly impossible. According to David Williams, who served as vice president of governmental relations for the Georgia Bankers Association (GBA) at the time, “To get statewide notice of your lien, you would have to file a UCC in every continued on page 6

The inaugural board of the GSCCCA was sworn into office in August 1993. Pictured from left to right taking the oath are Ray Marchman, Joanne Caldwell, Woodson Daniel, Luke Flatt, Dan Jordan, Sandra Glass, and Leighton Alston.

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CHAPTER ONE—CHANGE IS COMING

THE THREE CHAIRMEN Since its establishment, three distinguished and distinctive chairmen of the board have led the Authority.

While their backgrounds are diverse, they have shared an enthusiasm for serving the Superior Court clerks of Georgia and ensuring that they have the resources they need to be successful.

Woodson Daniel Superior Court Clerk of Pulaski County, 1961–2000 Chairman of the Authority, 1993–2005 Woodson Daniel, a native of Pulaski County, served in the military from 1946 to 1948. He began his career in public service in 1961 when he was elected Superior Court clerk of Pulaski County. He is considered to be the “grandfather of the clerks,” thanks in large part to his unwavering dedication to the creation of the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority. Governor Zell Miller appointed Daniel to the board of the Authority in 1993, and he was elected chairman by his peers. He served as a Superior Court clerk until his retirement in 2000 but remained as chairman of the board until 2005. Woodson Daniel’s incomparable service to the Authority convinced the board to name a conference room in the GSCCCA’s office in his honor.

Upon Daniel’s retirement as chairman, Barry Wilkes said, “Woodson has been the godfather of the Authority and has been its heart and soul. He set the direction and has always placed the interests of the clerks above all others. He is to be recognized and congratulated for his dedication to the clerks and the Authority. His involvement can be directly tied to the success the Authority has experienced.”

Thomas C. Lawler III Superior Court Clerk of Gwinnett County, 1996–2011 Chairman of the Authority, 2005–2011 Thomas C. Lawler III began his career in public service in January 1970 as a Gwinnett County police officer. He then served in the U.S. Army, followed by a position as solicitor of the Juvenile Court of Gwinnett County. Lawler also practiced private law and served as Gwinnett County district attorney. After his election to the office of clerk of Superior Court in 1996, he served as the legislative chair for the Superior Court Clerks’ Association of Georgia Inc. and was the driving force behind the development of the Clerks’ Reference Manual, a one-of-a-kind electronic resource. He joined the

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

Authority board in 2001 and was elected chairman in 2005, serving in that capacity until his death in 2011.

Although a realist to the core, Tom was also a visionary who dreamed big. During his tenure as chairman, he oversaw the creation and development of the Authority’s Fines & Fees Division, expanded training opportunities to include online classes, and provided the spark to create other bold projects such as the real estate eFiling system, including the development of standards, and the data archive project.

“The Authority is the best-run government entity I have seen in all my years of public service,” Lawler said upon being elected chairman. “It is obvious that the dedication of the Authority staff and the cooperation of all the Superior Court clerks throughout the state have created an environment of success. I am proud to be a part of the Authority.”

A Thomas C. Lawler Memorial Tribute plaque was dedicated in 2012 and hangs in the lobby of the Authority’s office.

F. Barry Wilkes Superior Court Clerk of Liberty County, 1985–Present Chairman of the Authority, 2012–Present F. Barry Wilkes, a native of southeastern Georgia, was an educator for five years for the Long County Public School System before becoming the assistant editor of a newspaper in Liberty County. He became the administrator of the six-county Atlantic Circuit District of Georgia public defender program before being elected Superior Court clerk of Liberty County in 1985. He helped create and served as the inaugural president of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia and was instrumental in the creation of the GSCCCA. In 2000, he was appointed to the board of the Authority and was elected vice chairman in 2001. He became chairman in 2012 and continues to serve to this day. In October 2013, Wilkes received the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award from the Superior Court Clerks’ Association of Georgia Inc.—a recognition conceived by his late friend and colleague, Tom Lawler.

When Wilkes was elected chairman of the Authority in early 2012, he observed, “It is a tremendous honor that my fellow board members selected me to chair the board, but it is a great responsibility that I do not take lightly. As I said back in 2000 when I became a member of the board, I am deeply committed to the Authority, what it has accomplished since its creation, and what it is doing for those of us in the trenches who are trying to provide excellent services to the citizens of our counties without putting more tax burden on their backs.”

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CHAPTER ONE—CHANGE IS COMING

continued from page 3

county.” Not only did filers have to travel to each of Georgia’s 159 counties to do this, but they also had to pay five dollars per filed UCC, totaling seven hundred ninety-five dollars to cover the state. The process was inconvenient and expensive. “The banking industry in Georgia wanted a central filing system, so we asked to have legislation introduced toward the end of the second year of a two-year session. We did this for two reasons.

One, we wanted to see who else had an interest in the bill. And two, we would have the summer to work out any issues with other interested groups.”

Little did the banking industry know that Wilkes, along with Gary Yates, Superior Court clerk of Gwinnett County, had been strategizing about the future of the Superior Court clerks. “We would talk almost daily about all kinds of issues relating to the clerks’ offices’ operations, legislation, politics, and so forth,” Yates said. “And for some period of time, we had been searching for a vehicle, an entity, or some type of As the Uniform Commercial Code indexing system came to life, memos and state documents outlined the progress.

RAISING REVENUE FOR THE COUNTIES The Authority is always looking for ways to help Superior Court clerks raise revenue for their counties. With the Real Estate Deed Project, the board found a perfect vehicle for doing just that. According to David Williams, since deed images were not mandated to be part of the original index, the GSCCCA reached an agreement with the leadership of the clerks’ organizations whereby the clerks would provide the deed images and receive a print fee from subscribers who accessed them.

“Subscribers are charged a print fee each time they print an image from our system. The fee—fifty cents per print—is the same as what a person would pay if he or she walked into the courthouse, but people are now able to print from the convenience of their home or office through our website,” he said. There are different levels of fee-based subscriptions—regular and premium—plus onetime usage fees. Approximately thirty-one million dollars has been returned to the counties for prints since the project’s inception. Williams added, “As county budgets are stretched thin, this additional revenue becomes more and more important.”

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

structure that would allow clerks to have access to products and services that they otherwise would not have had access to.”

That included an independent source of revenue. Through their conversations and research, Wilkes and Yates discovered that it might be possible to establish a governmental corporation—an authority— to accomplish their goal. They just needed the right project around which to develop that entity. When Daniel contacted Wilkes about the banking industry’s plan, they had their answer. But they had to act quickly. The bankers wanted the central filing system to be managed through the secretary of state’s office, as was being done in states throughout the country. However, if that were to happen, and the UCC filing process moved from the local level to a central location in Atlanta, then the clerks would actually lose a major source of revenue from those filings in their respective counties. Daniel, Wilkes, and Yates decided that they—and all Superior Court clerks—couldn’t let that happen.

Shortly afterward, Joe Brannen, president and CEO of the GBA, received a call from the clerks requesting a meeting that was held in the State Archives Building. “I remember walking in. There was this tension in the room that I didn’t expect,” he said of the gathering that included David Williams (also representing the GBA along with Brannen), Woodson Daniel, Barry Wilkes, Gary Yates, and Joanne Caldwell, Superior Court clerk of Rockdale County. “It started a little rocky. We didn’t do our homework well. We didn’t understand or appreciate the revenue stream that the UCCs represented for the clerks. But

In October 1995, several members of the board gathered for a meeting. Pictured from left to right are Luke Flatt, Dunbar Harrison, David Williams, Sandra Glass, Dan Jordan, Ray Marchman, and Woodson Daniel.

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CHAPTER ONE—CHANGE IS COMING

once we cleared the air during that first meeting, we realized we all had the same goal. It didn’t matter how we got there, as long as everyone was on the same path. We wanted to figure out a system that would work. We thought we had the best idea, but we didn’t.”

The clerks’ proposal involved creating a centralized indexing system for UCCs—not a centralized filing system. The system would allow UCCs to continue to be filed locally but then be transmitted to a central location via fax for indexing; the index would then be made available statewide through a private computer network.

The official paperwork—as well as the associated revenue— would remain in the county in which the UCC was filed. The system would be developed, implemented, and managed by an authority created by the clerks. And funding would not be a burden on taxpayers; instead, a new ten-dollar fee placed on UCC filings would help pay for the system. The fee would be split, with five dollars going to the county in which the document was filed and five dollars going to the authority for operation of The Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia, the agency created by state law to further the improvement of the Superior Court clerks, announced the launch of the GSCCCA’s UCC Project in the Winter 1995 edition of its newsletter, The Record.

the project. The concept had received overwhelming support during a special joint meeting of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia and the Superior Court Clerks’ Association of Georgia Inc., the professional association of the Superior Court

clerks, held in Macon in late November 1992. Barry Wilkes, president of the council, and Ovis Stephens, president of the association, issued a rallying cry using the Georgia Online (GO) Network’s rudimentary email system and a clerk phone calling network, asking all of the clerks of Superior Court to attend the meeting to discuss the potential UCC Project, which was viewed as “vital to our survival.” The nearly unanimous approval of the proposal by the clerks illustrated their desire to move forward together and fight for the project.

Upon hearing the unique proposal, the GBA agreed to work with the clerks to write new legislation, which countless hours were devoted to composing. Clerks, bankers, and lawyers, who also had an interest in having a centralized UCC indexing system, joined together in unprecedented fashion to brainstorm about what needed to be included in the bill. Because no other state had a system like the one being proposed, the participants were entering uncharted waters. Meetings occurred everywhere, from Superior Court clerks’ offices to a conference room in the law offices of Long, Aldridge & Norman, LLP, the professional home of Rusty Sewell, a governmental relations lobbyist who represented both the GBA and the State Bar of Georgia. “Truthfully, we didn’t know if it would work or not, but we just knew we could get it all together,” Sewell said.

Said Joe Brannen, “We couldn’t be impatient with the writing of the legislation. We had all of these meetings to go over the minutia of commas and sentences, making sure they were right. That’s really what the clerks brought 8

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

to the table. I have such respect for them because they understood that the details matter. Every word matters. It was a long bill, and it was a slow, deliberative process. And it would not have worked had the clerks not made us do it that way.”

Once the bill, HB 243, was written and ready to be dropped, the focus turned to lobbying. The clerks enlisted the help of lobbyists James E. (Jet) Toney and Mike Holiman of Cornerstone Communications Group. In conjunction with the efforts of the GBA and the State Bar, the team went to work, meeting with legislators to explain the purpose of the authority and the benefits of having a centralized UCC indexing system. “It was a very narrow mandate, but you had three pretty significant groups—the bankers, the lawyers, and the clerks—that were all agreeing on something,” explained Holiman, who today serves as executive director of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia. “The legislators have more difficulty when the bankers, the lawyers, and the clerks disagree on something.”

Rusty Sewell also spent his share of time under the capitol dome spelling out the proposal. “We had to sit down and explain what we were trying to do,” he recalled. “It represented a fairly big change. It wasn’t an easy bill to pass. But these are three groups that are politically powerful. And the legislators looked to see what the interested groups

James L. (Luke) Flatt, president and CEO of Community Bancshares Inc. and AB&T in Albany, boasts a forty-year career in the banking industry. While working with the Georgia Bankers Association, he became part of the effort to have HB 243 passed, establishing the Authority. His leadership in getting Senator Tommy Chambless, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to sponsor the bill was an invaluable piece of the complex puzzle.

had to say about it. If those groups were on board, then they were all for it.”

What also helped was that the bill received strong support from its sponsor: Tommy Chambless, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. James L. (Luke) Flatt, a longtime banking professional who worked with the GBA and currently is the president and CEO of Community Bancshares Inc. and AB&T in Albany, led the initiative to get Chambless on board with the legislation. “We felt that the legislation needed to come through Judiciary. We were really changing the way that filings would occur in the state.

Filings are used to secure liens, and it just made sense from a legal standpoint that Judiciary would be 9

CHAPTER ONE—CHANGE IS COMING

the committee that would shepherd that,” he noted. “Plus, it was our relationship with Tommy. Tommy was sensitive to the needs of the bankers and the clerks.” According to Woodson Daniel, “Tommy Chambless was our salvation. He believed in our project.”

Of course, HB 243 did have opponents. Some individuals believed the clerks would never be able to get all 159 independently elected officials to agree on anything, much less using an unproven system like the one being proposed. Additionally, a few entities in the courts hoped to derail the legislation, either for fiscal reasons or for a sense of control. But the clerks were up to the challenge, taking untold hours of their personal time to contact the people who would help move their effort forward. And they did the legwork. “It took blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of diplomacy,” Wilkes noted. “We had 159 people with the right political contacts, and we were able to convince the right people to support us.”

That diplomacy was needed as soon as the clerks began vying for the UCC Project, when several entities were pressing for the secretary of state’s office to manage the program. “I remember a meeting at the State Archives Building. All of these people gathered around a big table representing the secretary of state’s office, and other people sat around those people,” Joanne Caldwell reminisced. “They passed around these huge binders that talked about how they could set up this system, and we opened the binders and the price tag was millions of dollars. Millions! Woodson and I went out into the hallway later, and I said, ‘Did you see that figure?’”

After that encounter, a group of clerks, including Barry Wilkes, Woodson Daniel, and Joanne Caldwell, met with Secretary of State Max Cleland, with whom they had a good working relationship. According to Wilkes, “Woodson Daniel politely and diplomatically presented a case to him as to why Superior Court clerks, not the secretary of state’s office, should be the statutory agent for creating and operating a statewide UCC information system. We said, ‘You don’t want this project. It’s going to cost millions of dollars, and we can do it without requiring anything from the taxpayers.’” After much discussion, “Cleland relented and assured us that he would tell legislators and other stakeholders that his office was not interested in the project.”

Throughout the entire process of lobbying for HB 243, the clerks and their associates stayed the course, never wavering from the goal of creating an authority that would break new ground. In fact, Daniel traveled to the capitol every day during the legislative session while the legislation was pending action. David Williams, who had been named point person by the GBA for the bankers’ efforts, devoted a comparable amount of time to the passage of the bill. Many others also spent hours supporting and promoting HB 243, and Brannen believed that Georgia’s legislators were ready to do something unconventional. “There is uniqueness to our state,” he said. “We don’t mind being the first to eat an oyster.”

Finally, the day came. Caldwell recalled, “I think the most memorable time was standing in the hallway and watching the last vote. It was not a close vote.” In short order, Governor Zell Miller signed HB 243 into law. On July 1, 1993, the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority was established. But the 10

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

work was far from over, and the road ahead for the organization, which became known simply as the Authority, was paved with considerable challenges and significant triumphs.

And So It Began In early August 1993, W. Wright Banks Jr. began working in the Office of the Attorney General of Georgia.

During one of his first days on the job, he joined his supervisor in the governor’s office, where the inaugural board of the GSCCCA was being sworn in. That seven-person board included Woodson Daniel; Joanne Caldwell; Dan Jordan; Sandra Glass, Superior Court clerk of Oconee County; Luke Flatt; Ray Marchman, county commissioner and former Superior Court clerk of Greene County; and Leighton Alston, a banker from Carrollton. Daniel was elected as the first chairman of the board, and Flatt became vice chairman.

THE POWER O F CO MMUN I CATI O N Long before the Authority helped create the first statewide Intranet, the clerks understood the power of being able to communicate with each other beyond the telephone. In the early 1990s, Barry Wilkes and Gary Yates, along with several other Superior Court clerks, recognized an opportunity when the secretary of state’s office requested the right to manage Georgia’s corporate charters, as opposed to having them filed in the clerks’ offices, as they had been for years. “Automation was just starting, and we needed a network so that we could communicate with each other,” Wilkes said. “We also didn’t just want to give the secretary of state’s office the corporate charters without something in exchange.” A deal was made that gave the clerks access to the Georgia Online (GO) Network, a primitive, mainframe-based form of email.

Right away, Wilkes and Yates began using the GO Network to discuss the future of the clerks of Superior Court.

“We were able to communicate fairly rapidly and stay in touch. That helped us,” Wilkes noted. “It became a springboard for exchanging ideas.” In fact, Wilkes emailed the idea for creating an authority to Yates after reading the enabling legislation for the Jekyll Island Authority late one night. He recalled, “I became excited and turned around in my chair, back to my computer, writing an email message to Gary.

‘We need to create our own authority,’ I wrote. A few minutes later, he wrote back one of his terse replies: ‘That can work.’” With that, the wheels were put in motion for creating the GSCCCA.

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“I remember as we walked back from the ceremony, I was told that one of my tasks was going to be to help get this Authority up and running,” said Banks, who became the primary legal counsel for the GSCCCA in the attorney general’s office. “They had no budget. All they had was an all-volunteer board that was appointed in one way or another, and I was told to do everything I could to help them.”

Banks worked with Daniel, board members, and Barry Wilkes to set up the first meeting of the Authority, which was held on the third floor of the State Judicial Building on August 5, 1993. While Wilkes was instrumental in writing and promoting legislation that created the Authority, he declined to serve on the board; as the then chairperson of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia, he was required to serve as the interim director of the GSCCCA until a permanent director was hired. So together, Wilkes, Daniel, and the board, supported by Banks, forged ahead with the plans to create the framework for the new statewide UCC indexing system. According to Flatt, “We realized we had to start somewhere, but we didn’t know how to stand up a system from scratch.”

Budgetary issues were a prime concern, considering that no money had been appropriated to develop the centralized UCC indexing system. Eventually, the new UCC filing fee would help build a reserve of funds; a statutory provision would allow the GSCCCA to receive part of the funds beginning in January 1994, which would go toward the system’s infrastructure and other startup costs. Until that time, however, board members had to think outside the box to move forward. They personally handled all of their own expenses associated with GSCCCA business. The board also inquired about the Authority’s ability to borrow money; it was possible with authorization from the Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission (GSFIC), but the Authority had to obtain bids from various financial institutions before entering into a loan agreement. Ultimately, the GSFIC granted approval for the Authority to establish a one-hundred-thousand-dollar line of credit, which was handled through Wachovia Bank.

While the funding issues were being tackled, the board also had to figure out how they were going to develop the automated system for filing, transmitting, and indexing UCCs. The original plan that Woodson Daniel devised called for the Authority to contract with a private third-party vendor that would be responsible for managing the central indexing function and providing the UCC information electronically via a computer network so that users could search for documents. A fax machine had to be placed in every one of Georgia’s 159 Superior Court clerks’ offices, as well as communication lines for the transmission of the faxes, and the Authority had no model for reference. The closest examples were in Alabama and Louisiana—although both were central filing systems managed by those states’ secretary of state offices. The board, however, felt it was imperative to visit Alabama and Louisiana and observe their systems.

The trip to Louisiana proved to be particularly beneficial, as the board met Jan Swift, a private attorney whom Louisiana’s secretary of state had hired to help build its centralized UCC filing system. “We said, ‘We need her or someone like her to help us,’” Daniel recalled. “We didn’t know whether she would do it or what it was going to cost. She came to Atlanta, and we met with her. She would do the project 12

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

over approximately two years, providing the necessary groundwork to get the network established and overseeing the process to see that it was getting done.” Her forty-thousand-dollar fee posed a problem, however, until Daniel found a solution. “A friend of mine gave me the money with the understanding that he might not get it back,” he said. “That paid for Jan Swift to do the work she did.”

With Swift on board, attention turned to finding a vendor. “The challenge was developing a procurement document that would go out to interested vendors,” said Banks. “It would tell them the pitfalls of the project: it had never been done before, and we had no idea what was going to happen.

But, at the same time, it couldn’t be so negative that no one would bid on it.” The vendor would have to be paid on a per-instrument basis, meaning that its fees would be based on the number of filings that actually occurred, and it would have to make a major investment in the beginning, hoping that the target number of filings would be achieved so that the vendor could recoup the investment. The venture

In 1993, W. Wright Banks Jr., who was new to the Office of the Attorney General, was charged with helping the recently installed inaugural board of the GSCCCA get the Authority up and running and create the framework of the UCC indexing system. More than twenty years and many successful projects later, he continues to serve as legal counsel for the organization.

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attracted five bidders from around the country. An evaluation committee reviewed all of the bids, and board members traveled to the headquarters of each potential vendor. “We had a period when we traveled to Columbus, West Palm Beach, and Baltimore all within three days on a small plane,” Dan Jordan recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m a real jet-setter now.’”

In the end, Cott Systems out of Ohio was chosen to partner with the Authority on the UCC Project. According to Banks, the company offered the best combination of pricing and technology solutions. Yet the negotiations were arduous, and the two sides engaged in heated debates about the details of the deal. “I can remember negotiating with Cott in a conference room at the offices of Troutman Sanders in the Bank of America tower in Atlanta,” said Luke Flatt, who joined Barry Wilkes, Leighton Alston, and Woodson Daniel in representing the Authority during the grueling

Former board members and Superior Court clerks Joanne Caldwell (Rockdale County) and Sandra Glass (Oconee County) and board member Connie Cheatham (McDuffie County) have each played an important role in the development and advancement of the GSCCCA. Their dedication and contributions to the Authority were and continue to be vital. Their shared memories are an intrinsic part of the GSCCCA’s legacy.

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discussions with Cott’s executives and lawyers. “It was a very tense time. We wanted things that they didn’t want to give. We worked late one night—probably past 10 p.m. I’m passionate, and my passion would overflow. But I just remember the calm that Woodson Daniel kept in that meeting.” After an agreement finally was reached, Cott was awarded the contract on May 20, 1994. Using the seed money it was able to access, the Authority opened an office at the Galleria in Cobb County, which served as the nerve center for the centralized UCC indexing system. Right away, Barry Wilkes and Jan Swift set a plan to travel around the state conducting training sessions for bankers, lawyers, and other professionals who ultimately would use the UCC database.

With the project on its way, the board faced one more critical hurdle: educating the Superior Court clerks about the centralized UCC indexing system and convincing them to use it. “That was a hard and laborious process, telling 159 people that they were going to have to change the way they did things,” Joanne Caldwell recalled. Led by Gary Yates, who had experience with automation and indexing, board members traversed Georgia, visiting judicial districts—often on weekends—to explain the system and how it worked. “The majority of those meetings were great meetings. We would have fifteen, twenty, or more clerks, and it was really an awareness effort as much as anything,” Yates said. “Those meetings were the best way to convey the same message so that everybody heard the same thing at the same time. And one of the perks is that clerks will speak up and ask questions. We made an effort to take all of that feedback and all of those considerations and put them into play to the extent where they could be used.”

Of course, some of the Superior Court clerks simply were not as willing as others to accept the new system. From concerns over a loss of revenue to an aversion to using technology, their reasons for rebuffing the centralized UCC indexing system varied. But they did have something in common. “There was fear of the unknown. It was about not really understanding what we were doing,” Luke Flatt said.

Fortunately, a vast majority of the clerks did stand behind the new system and were poised to begin using it when it was ready to launch.

And that can be attributed to the unyielding efforts of the core group of clerks who proposed and developed the project. “The clerks knew change was coming,” Yates noted. “Politically and technologically, change was happening all around. And it was going to happen in the clerks’ offices in one fashion or another. What brought the unity was explaining it in such a way that they understood that it’s better for us to collectively design our future together than to have someone else tell us what that future would look like.”

History was made when Dianne C. Browne, Superior Court clerk of Bleckley County, sent the first UCC fax on January 3, 1995. To this day, she recalls what it felt like to participate in such a symbolic and important act for the GSCCCA and Superior Court clerks throughout Georgia.

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For the Superior Court clerks, the future began on January 3, 1995, at 10:42 a.m. with the first UCC faxed by Dianne C. Browne, Superior Court clerk of Bleckley County. Seeing the fax stream in from Fax Machine 3, Barry Wilkes understood the profound meaning of that one simple act. In an article he wrote for The Record, a publication of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia, he said, “The first fax was symbolic of . . . persistence. It was the culmination of five years of planning and hard work. It was a moment to be treasured, for it belonged to every Superior Court clerk in Georgia. Throughout the day, I kept thinking how wonderful it was to have been able to be part of such a momentous event, one that will affect the way citizens of Georgia do business long after I am gone.”

Success Breeds Success: The Real Estate Deed Project It may have taken several years to bring the Authority into being, but the visionaries behind it never really stopped to revel in their impressive accomplishment. “When we got the UCC Project up and going, I told Luke Flatt, ‘Now that we finished this project, we need to get some other projects going,’” Daniel recalled. “And Luke said, ‘What do you mean other projects?’”

While the original mandate of the Authority was to develop and implement the UCC Project, Daniel, Wilkes, and others understood that the GSCCCA would have to evolve and expand if it was going to survive in perpetuity. “They knew that the Authority, long-term, would not be limited to running a UCC central indexing system,” Wright Banks said. “In my legal work for the Authority, all I really saw were the nuts and bolts of how to operate the Authority. But they saw a lot more in terms of where the Authority could go, both in assisting clerks of Superior Court and in helping the general public.”

Board members had their eyes open for the next opportunity. During this time David Williams, who had been hired as executive director of the Authority in July 1995 to replace Carol Clark, the GSCCCA’s first executive director, brought an option to the table. While working at the capitol one day, Williams had a casual conversation with Bill Dodson, the volunteer legislative liaison from the Real Property Law Section of the State Bar of Georgia. “As a title lawyer, I had run titles in many counties across the state.

While shooting the breeze in the hallway at the capitol, I was grumbling that a title examiner who ran titles in more than one county was at a disadvantage because each clerk could index deeds any way they wanted, which exposed purchasers and lenders to title claims due to missed encumbrances,” Dodson recalled. “One of us—I don’t recall who—thought it would be really helpful if all clerks indexed deeds the same way.”

The idea of creating a standardized, centralized indexing system for real estate deeds and personal property records seemed like a natural fit for the Authority, based on its early success with the burgeoning UCC Project. Daniel and Wilkes recognized the potential of working with property documents, which would offer an even more robust revenue source for both the clerks’ offices and the Authority, thanks to the fact that real estate records do not have a limited duration of time associated with them like UCCs, 16

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

which are good for only five years. And so, after several discussions, the board agreed to move forward with an effort to expand its mandate to include the Real Estate Deed Project.

As HB 1613 made its way through the Georgia General Assembly during the 1996 legislative session, Mike Holiman of Cornerstone Communications Group again lobbied on behalf of the clerks. This time, support from within the legislature came more quickly. In fact, Speaker Tom Murphy was one of the first to back the bill, and individuals including Roy Barnes, Jim Martin, and Robert Reichert followed. “The legislators had seen what the clerks had done with the UCC Project—that they had been successful in creating a database,” Holiman said. “Seeing that, the legislators had gained confidence in the clerks and the Authority, and they felt it was a risk worth taking. And they enacted the legislation in spite of perhaps the misgivings of those who thought we might fail.”

AHE AD OF THE CURVE: HB 1582 Over the years, the Authority has become synonymous with being ahead of the curve and taking on technological challenges that other organizations have not even considered. By 2002, the GSCCCA proved just how far this mind-set extended when it voluntarily lobbied for the passage of HB 1582, which required the automation of every Superior Court clerk’s office throughout the entire state. According to Barry Wilkes, the bill called for the clerks to use automated civil case management systems as well as automated criminal case management systems in their offices, in addition to recording all real and personal property documents in an electronic database. The initiative, which was a cooperative effort between the Authority, the Georgia House of Representatives’ Criminal Justice Subcommittee, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, was a springboard for creating a platform that would allow the Authority to be prepared to take on nearly any kind of electronic records management program.

To help outfit the Superior Court clerks’ offices with the appropriate technology and equipment, the Authority received a grant from the Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee, which provided the financial resources needed to implement the initiative. “This was a critical effort for the Authority,” Wilkes explained.

“It imposed a mandate on clerks that required us to automate real estate, personal property, and civil and criminal case management systems. This was the first time in our history that there was any mandatory system required for processing instruments filed in our offices. We chose to mandate the requirement so that we could have uniformity throughout the state, to require compliance in preparation for future statewide automated projects and, once and for all, to declare to the world that clerks were leading the charge in technological advancement within the judiciary and county and state government.”

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One group in particular did voice its reservations loudly: the Georgia Association of Realtors.

According to Holiman, the proposed additional fee on real estate filings that would fund the project became a point of contention for Realtors. As with the UCC Project, a new ten-dollar filing fee on real estate documents would be split, with five dollars remaining in the county and five dollars going to the Authority for the development, implementation, and continuation of the system. Every clerk’s office would receive the same five dollars, regardless of the county’s size. And ultimately, the system would pay for itself. But because the Realtors did not think it would be possible to create such a large, encompassing system for private property records, they were apprehensive about supporting the new fee. “It was a daunting task to consider, but we knew it was worth the challenge,” asserted Luke Flatt, who noted that the creation of a centralized indexing system for real property transactions was “one thousand times more difficult” than creating the UCC centralized indexing system. However, he continued, “Over time, the system could become a reliable source for people searching real estate records.”

The Georgia General Assembly proved its faith in the GSCCCA and passed HB 1613. The project called for the Authority to provide computer access to deed indexes in all 159 counties and to create standards for the indexing process. Once up and running, the project would give the public unprecedented free access to the records via a search terminal, or computer, placed in every Superior Court clerk’s office, and the business community would be able to subscribe to the online system and obtain official land records from any computer with Internet access. With January 1, 1999, as the target date for the system to be operational, the Authority had its work cut out. The GSCCCA partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Economic Development Institute (EDI) to design the system, which included the state’s very first Intranet, while Cott Systems was selected to implement and manage it.

While David Williams and John Myers, director of EDI’s Center for Public Buildings, along with several software architects and engineers, including Georgia Tech’s senior research scientist and technical guru George Olive, refined the technology plan for the highly complex system, Gary Yates and a team of board members, clerks, and other associates went to work writing the indexing standards. “Some of the longest and hardest times we had were trying to decide how to index [the deeds],” Sandra Glass explained. “Those were the times that really could rack your brain. We had to figure out how to index everything the same way, and then we were going to have to teach everybody how to do it.”

“I think all of us got frustrated with each other at times with the slowness of the process and the minutia we were dealing with, but I never lost faith that we would get the job done,” Bill Dodson said.

“Stick five, ten, or fifteen highly independent and engaged folks in a room and you’ll not get a consensus on a menu for lunch, let alone on something as sweeping as what we proposed. But I have the highest respect, regard, and affection for all of the clerks involved due to the level of engagement they brought to the table and the deep concern they brought to represent their constituents as best they could. We argued a lot, but in the end came up with a very good, practical system.” continued on page 23

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THE N OTAB LE N OTARY PUB LIC D IVI S ION While the general public may not realize that the Authority maintains Georgia’s central database of all active notaries public, totaling approximately 160,000 people, the state recognized early on that this unique organization would be the perfect entity to handle such an important function. “The GSCCCA Notary Division was created in 1997 when the Georgia legislature transferred certain centralized record keeping and certification functions relating to notaries public from the secretary of state,” said Peter Keesom, manager of the Notary Public Division. “Notaries public are commissioned at the county level by the clerk of Superior Court; the Clerks’ Authority has such a strong relationship with the local clerks’ offices that it is a natural fit for the Authority to maintain the statewide database.”

Today, the GSCCCA’s Notary Public Division not only manages the notaries public database but also issues apostilles, an international certification of a public document to be used in other Hague Convention countries; in 1998 the U.S. State Department recognized the Authority as the only agency outside of a secretary of state’s office that boasts this responsibility. By 2004 the GSCCCA developed its Notary Online tool, which makes processing notary applications more efficient in the Superior Court clerks’ offices, allows counties immediate access to their notary filings and images, and simplifies the overall notary application process for the public—all while giving the public free access to search Georgia’s notary database. And the numbers reveal just how prolific and successful the division has been over the years: annually it issues close to thirty-one thousand apostilles, services ninety-five hundred walk-in customers, handles more than thirty-nine hundred mail-in requests, and takes over ten thousand phone calls. According to Keesom, in the future, electronic documents with electronic signatures and notarizations will become an important and innovative feature for the burgeoning department.

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I N THE HE AT O F BAT TLE Today, the Authority is well known for its record of success. Every project the organization has assumed has been a true triumph, yet none of those achievements came easy. Along with the unparalleled feats, there have been roadblocks, struggles, and pushback over the years. Many of the legislative battles fought— from the UCC Project to the Real Estate Deed Project to HB 1EX and beyond—have been based on others’ desire for power and control. And as the Authority has evolved, assuming more high-profile projects within the state along the way, Superior Court clerks have had to fight not only to keep their autonomy but also to preserve their rightful place among the state’s elected officials.

“Within our ranks, we were blessed to have visionaries whose imaginings for our future became our aspirations. At the same time, we were destined to have the right leaders to shepherd our efforts to transform those collective visions into tangible projects essential for achieving our long-term goals,” Barry Wilkes said. “Our wars began when, for the first time in our history, our goals conflicted with those of other elected officials who wanted to profit from our ideas and the sweat of our brow. We had no choice but to fight in order to create the Authority, which, long before it was created, we envisioned would become the paradigm of governmental efficiency and service delivery that it is.”

After each legislative victory, the Authority’s struggles continued. “With each success, we showed the strength of the Authority,” Wilkes said. “That was very threatening to the entities that did not have a track record like ours.”

However, the clerks’ collective dedication to the cause and steadfast spirit for wading into the battles that had to be fought have allowed the Authority to flourish for nearly two decades. Even when there have been internal skirmishes or disagreements The Georgia State Capitol building became a second home to those who lobbied with and on behalf of the Authority. Countless hours were spent under the capitol dome, speaking to those who could help the GSCCCA become what it is today. The accomplishments of the Authority within this historic building will always be a part of its storied narrative.

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among the clerks, they have always managed to come together to fight as one. “I’m convinced that the reason we have prevailed triumphantly in the battles and wars we have had to fight is because we have always tried to do what is right for the common good and not just what is good for us,” Wilkes concluded. “That is the only logical explanation for Cindy Mason, Superior Court clerk of Columbia County, and Mike Holiman, principal of Cornerstone Communications Group and executive director of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia, testify before a committee on behalf of the GSCCCA. Both Mason and Holiman have dedicated time and extensive effort for some of the Authority’s most important pieces of legislation, including HB 1EX and HB 198.

how we—159 independentthinking, unique, elected clerks of Superior Court of this state—have coalesced into

one goal-driven organization with a common will and how we have achieved what we did, when we did, and without any resources. The battles for clerks of Superior Court will probably never end, so we have to be vigilant and adequately prepared to sound the rallying call. As one of those blessed to be a part of and witness to this momentous time in our history, I pray that, long after I am gone, the generations of clerks of Superior Court to come will forever protect, preserve, defend, and advance the legacy for which so many of us have worked and fought so hard and sacrificed so much to create for our and their future and the good of all Georgians.”

It’s not unusual for members of the GSCCCA to spend hours strategizing and planning for the future. Chairman F. Barry Wilkes and Executive Director David Williams often spearheaded the discussions regarding legislative initiatives and other Authority business.

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As the GSCCCA has moved forward with everything from the new UCC indexing system in the mid-1990s to the Real Estate Deed Project of the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has received widespread attention.

Partners, local media outlets, and many others have helped publicize and tout not only the Authority’s efforts but also its impressive achievements.

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continued from page 18

“One of the most satisfying times for me was when everybody finally agreed on the standards. I was talking to Gary and said, ‘Do you realize that we all finally came together today?’ It was interesting because, all of a sudden, everybody saw the same thing. We did not have peace and calmness when we met to discuss the standards. There were a lot of debates. And I think they had me there to help make peace,” Glass mused. “But then everybody began to look at it in the same way. We were all on the same page. It was so interesting how that happened.”

The indexing standards ensured that every property transaction filed provided the same information in the same way, including the name of the seller and buyer, the location of the property, any liens on the property, and the book and page where the deed was filed in the county. The clerks had to be trained and certified to use the new system, and that training was intensive. But first, Dodson said, the clerks had to be convinced that standardization was even necessary. Once again, Yates hit the road, this time with the Authority’s standardization committee. And while there were a few holdouts, as with the UCC Project, the clerks once more demonstrated their willingness to be progressive. They also provided

A NEW STANDARD When it was time to sit down and write the indexing standards that would be used for the Real Estate Deed Project, the Authority had its work cut out. However, it also had an ace in the hole: Gary Yates. Years before the project came into being, Yates, Superior Court clerk of Gwinnett County, had set out to automate his own office. He created a set of indexing standards that his staff used to manage their own records, and he continued to refine those standards over time. When the Authority needed indexing standards for the Real Estate Deed Project, Yates’ automation effort was discussed. But the visionary clerk didn’t think the standards he had written previously would suffice, and he decided to rewrite them from scratch. Thus, he joined forces with his Superior Court clerk colleagues to create the standards that are still used today.

“It was a collaborative, group effort in so many ways,” Yates recalled. According to Jean Rogers, “We had to start out with those indexing standards written by Gary. Without them, the system would have crumbled.”

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excellent suggestions regarding the standards.

“We got a lot of feedback from the clerks,” Yates said. “So all of the clerks in the state participated in helping to write the standards.” And they were ready to begin when the project went live as planned—more than three years after the Authority developed the idea.

Again, the Authority achieved something that many people believed it could not do: bring together elected officials to work toward a common goal that benefited citizens of the state Chairman Tom Lawler, Jean Rogers, and other board members listen as Executive Director David Williams addresses long-range plans for the Authority at a meeting in 2010.

without being a burden on them financially. The GSCCCA also took court technology to a new level with the Real Estate Deed Project, introducing

computers into every Superior Court clerk’s office in Georgia. It was a pioneering effort—one that did not go unnoticed by agencies and officials throughout the state.

A New Perception Even before the Real Estate Deed Project got fully under way, the perception of the Superior Court clerks began to change. In fact, the shift started in 1997 when secretary of state Lewis Massey and Cathy Cox (who would later become secretary of state) approached Williams about the Authority taking over Georgia’s notary public responsibilities. The success of the UCC Project convinced them that the Authority was the perfect entity to maintain a central database of all active notaries public, as well as issue apostilles and notary certifications. Being asked to take on the job was a significant moment for the Authority, as it revealed the impact that the clerks’ collective efforts had in terms of their stature. What’s more, the project was so substantial that it allowed the GSCCCA to create an entire division around it.

“Our past successes have helped turn the tide in our favor,” David Williams observed. And when the Real Estate Deed Project came to people’s attention, the Authority’s impressive capabilities became widely recognized. “People first started noticing the Clerks’ Authority when we set up the state’s first Intranet. This network caught the attention of a lot of groups within the courthouse and state government.

It was amazing that this little group of clerks of Superior Court had accomplished something no other group had been able to do: hook up all 159 counties to a single point. After the success of establishing the network, many other projects and opportunities came our way.”

One such opportunity was the Fines & Fees Project, for which the Authority launched another new division in 2004. But getting to that point was not easy. The GSCCCA headed back to the statehouse to 24

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lobby for what ultimately would become HB 1EX, often referred to as the Fines & Fees bill. “Prior to the start of the 2004 session of the Georgia General Assembly, there was talk of a bill being dropped that would give the General Assembly something they had wanted for years—an accounting of the dollars that flowed through Georgia’s courts. This information was vital for lawmakers as they formed budgets, debated adding judges, and more,” Williams said. “When the bill was finally dropped, there seemed to be universal agreement among the groups affected that the proposed legislation needed to be completely rewritten. The members of the General Assembly agreed, but the million-dollar question that had to be answered was: Who would be asked to take on the project?”

Fines & Fees staff members Julie Maher and Maureen Miranda work tirelessly to implement the initiatives defined in HB 1EX. The Fines & Fees Division, which was established in 2004, provides a detailed accounting of the money that flows through Georgia’s court system.

When the judicial branch and key legislators requested that the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) oversee the collection, reporting, and distribution of fines and fees resulting from criminal cases in the state’s eleven hundred courts, the Superior Court clerks wholeheartedly objected. The Authority wanted to ensure that a state agency would not be given the power to govern local courts and, by extension, the clerks. The battle that ensued under the capitol dome was nothing short of epic, resulting in a special legislative session being called to decide which agency would be given the Fines & Fees Project.

According to Mike Holiman, who again lobbied on behalf of the Authority for what soon became HB 1EX, the major problem arose when the Senate and the House backed two different entities.

Members of the Senate initially wanted to give the project to the AOC, while the Authority had the support of members of the House, including Speaker Terry Coleman and Minority Leader DuBose Porter. “Woodson Daniel was at the capitol one day, like he was every day,” Williams recalled. “This day, he happened to be sitting outside DuBose Porter’s office. According to Woodson, when DuBose saw him sitting there, he grabbed Title 15 of the Official Code of Georgia, opened the book to the GSCCCA enabling legislation, and said to Woodson, ‘The Clerks’ Authority is who should take on the Fines & Fees Project.’”

In only one day, Development Manager Richard McPhaul designed the prototype for the Fines & Fees system that David Williams and Mike Holiman used to persuade House and Senate leadership to name the Authority as the statutory agency for the project instead of the Administrative Office of the Courts. That system is still used to collect and report the fines and fees that are garnered across Georgia.

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John Earle was hired in 2004 to build the Fines & Fees Division from the ground up, and continues to oversee its daily operations. In 2007, he took on additional responsibilities as director of financial operations for the Authority, and then, in 2013, was named deputy director.

The Authority board elevated him to the position of executive director in 2014, to fill the opening left by the death of longtime director David Williams.

As the legislation was being rewritten, two competing sub-bills—one naming the Authority as the statutory agency, and the other naming the AOC—were introduced. Votes were on the line, and the GSCCCA board, along with David Williams, knew that they had to prove that the Authority could do the job better than any other agency. They asked in-house developer Richard McPhaul to create a prototype of the system that would be used to collect and report the fines and fees gathered across Georgia. He built a working system in one day, and Williams and Holiman took that prototype to the House and Senate leadership. “Not only was our proposed system much less expensive than the competing proposal, but it also would allow for a daily accounting of the fines and fees collected by the courts,” Holiman noted. “The leadership expected a semiannual or quarterly accounting. We promised that every night, after 7 p.m., the state treasury would be able to see how much was collected that day, that month, and that year to date.”

That system provided an edge that the Authority greatly needed. According to Connie Cheatham, so did the clerks’ collective dedication to the effort. “We prevailed because of the hard work done walking the halls of the capitol by [the Authority’s leadership] and by clerks across the state joining together in 26

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a united front,” she said. “One vivid memory I have is the Judiciary Committee meeting when the AOC brought the chief justice over to speak on their behalf, and we had a good solid showing of clerks sitting right there on the front row. It was amazing to see the dedication of those in the midst of the battle and really fun to watch them strategize, making calls, pulling legislators aside, and doing whatever they could to ensure success. This was not the first time nor the last time clerks have been able to accomplish what some would think to be impossible.”

During the special session of the Georgia General Assembly called by Governor Sonny Perdue, which was held May 3–7, 2004, the clerks were victorious in an extremely close vote. Having lobbied hard for the bill’s passage, Tom Lawler, who served on the Authority board and would be elected its chairman a year later, looked at David Williams and bluntly said, “Well, we got it for you, so now don’t screw it up!”

With this hard-fought victory, the GSCCCA began another complex project. “We struggled with creating a systematic methodology for ensuring compliance while, at the same time, fulfilling our statutory duties,” remembered Barry Wilkes. “I think Tom tired of all the rhetoric.

During a meeting, he told us all to leave him alone for a while and then he disappeared.

When he returned in a couple hours, he had drafted the rules and regulations for the Fines & Fees Division—which, to this day, have been amended only slightly since he created them.”

The new program also required a grassroots endeavor to educate and train the clerks about its newest system. This time, though, it was John Earle, whom David Williams hired to manage the new Fines & Fees Division, leading the charge. The use of technology is central to the GSCCCA and its goals.

“Mike Holiman and I traveled throughout the To help explain how the Authority uses the latest high-tech applications to benefit the

clerks and the work they do, the organization embarked on a marketing campaign that

state between 2004 and 2005,” said Earle. “We included the brochure pictured here.

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CHAPTER ONE—CHANGE IS COMING

THE S UN SET PROVI S I O N SET S AT LAST When the Real Estate Deed Project began, the Authority made an agreement with the Georgia Association of Realtors that the ten-dollar filing fee would be reduced to five dollars after a certain date if the project did not meet expectations. The Sunset Provision, as it became known, was passed by the Georgia General Assembly with one key stipulation: the Authority was able to extend that date every other year until June 30, 2016, and continue to collect the ten-dollar fee. The condition, and the extension of the date, would be based directly on the project’s success.

The extraordinary success of the Real Estate Deed Project over the years, with millions of real estate documents stored in the database and tens of thousands of people accessing the system annually, convinced the Authority board that the Sunset Provision needed to be eliminated and the original ten-dollar funding mechanism preserved permanently. By 2012 the Authority, in collaboration with the Georgia Association of Realtors and the State Bar of Georgia Real Property Law Section, drafted HB 198, which sought to remove the provision. The bill was passed by an overwhelming majority in both houses, and, soon after, Governor Nathan Deal signed it into law. According to Barry Wilkes, “In the end, what convinced everyone that the Sunset Provision needed to be abolished was the Authority’s record over the past decade-and-a-half—a record of accomplishment and achievement that is unparalleled by any state governmental entity.”

Governor Nathan Deal signs HB 198, repealing the Sunset Provision on the funding mechanism for the Clerks’ Authority.

Left to right: Dan Massey (Chatham County), Greg Allen (Forsyth County), Authority Chairman Barry Wilkes (Liberty County), Council Executive Director Mike Holiman, Governor Nathan Deal, Rep Tom Rice, Charles Baker (Hall County), and Authority Executive Director David Williams.

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

went from the Okefenokee Swamp to the North Georgia mountains,” explaining the rules, regulations, and requirements of HB 1EX to the clerks. “[Holiman] introduced me to the clerks, and it was great to get out there and meet them. They’re a great group of people, and you can see that they want to do the right thing.”

It was a tremendous collaborative effort to set up the complex accounting system, but the board and the clerks knew it could be done. Today, the courttrax.org website is the state’s signature resource for fines and fees reporting. Annually, the GSCCCA’s Fines & Fees Division collects and disburses approximately one hundred million dollars in court fees and processes more than thirty thousand monthly reports submitted by reporting entities. And while the Fines & Fees Project ultimately ended up being revenue neutral, it wasn’t about incoming funds for the Authority. It was about the respect given to the organization. “This was not a financial project,” Earle asserted. “It was about the fact that we had gained the trust of the legislature. We said, ‘You can give us a big project, and we can successfully implement that project.’”

Over the years, additional projects have been added to the Authority’s repertoire. Some have been requested, such as the PT-61 Project, which is a collaborative program between the Authority and the Department of Revenue to provide an easy, online process for filing a Real Estate Transfer Tax form, and the Carbon Sequestration Registry, in which the GSCCCA worked with the Georgia Forestry Commission to create a registry to promote offsetting reductions in greenhouse gases by sequestering carbon. Others have come from within, including the Historical Deed Re-Indexing Project, which was launched in 2002 with the goal of adding to the central index all historical deeds—to the beginning of any such record keeping in any given Georgia county.

Looking back, even the people who brought the Authority to fruition are amazed at what the organization has become. “It was very improbable that any of this could have occurred,” said Wilkes, who was elected chairman of the now ten-person board in 2012. “You had people from such different backgrounds and with different personalities that otherwise had nothing in common, but they pulled together toward a common goal. And they had the wherewithal and the persistence to do it.”

Dan Jordan, Superior Court clerk of Jasper County, served as an original board member of the GSCCCA. He continues to serve Jasper County in the clerk’s office but fondly recalls those early days with the Authority.

29

The Authority’s valuable data and images reside on servers in its primary data center. The amount of information stored on these servers is staggering and continues to grow with each year. Here, IT Director Andy Wightwick, right, and Systems Manager Eric Bolton evaluate equipment in what has become the nerve center of the GSCCCA.

GEORGIA SUPERIOR COURT C L E R KS ’ CO O PE R ATI V E AU T H O R IT Y F O R T H E R E C O R D — T H E U N I Q U E S U C C E S S S T O R Y O F T H E G S C C C A

C H A P T E R

T W O

The Road to Your Courthouse Door Is

Going to Be Electronic W

hen the UCC Project launched, the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority

provided every clerk’s office with a fax machine and phone line. For many of the clerks, especially those in Georgia’s smaller counties, it was the first fax machine their office ever had, and it was a big deal. It felt like a huge technological leap into the future. However, only a few years later, the Authority eclipsed the technological advances it made during its maiden project when it implemented the Real Estate Deed Project. That initiative, which called for one or more computer terminals with Internet access to be installed in each clerk’s office, made the clerks the most well-connected

constitutional

officers in the state. It also transformed the Authority into the premier technology group in the local courthouse system.

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CHAPTER TWO—THE ROAD TO YOUR COURTHOUSE DOOR IS GOING TO BE ELECTRONIC

TRAINING THE CLERKS Since the UCC Project launched, training has become one of the Authority’s core services—so much so that David Williams in 2005 hired Rachel Rice as the Authority’s training coordinator to develop this critical resource further. Training opportunities are always offered during conferences in the spring and fall, and they are supplemented with several other types of training: • Classroom Training. For everything from UCC to real estate indexing standards training, the Authority gathers clerks at its main office and at locations around the state for classroom training. The main office’s state-ofthe-art conference room, with an eighty-seven-inch SMART Board, a seventy-inch high-definition TV, and more, is an ideal location for presenting information to participants.

• Webinars. Conducted via the Internet, the Authority’s webinars allow clerks to have as many staff members as possible participate in training opportunities. In addition to the standard training topics, webinars are offered for Fines & Fees, eFiling, and Advanced Indexing Standards training.

• Online. Offered around the clock, online courses can be accessed by busy clerks and their employees through the Authority’s website. The online courses include the standard training topics, as well as notary public training.

The various training options have not only been well received by the clerks but they also have become some of the Authority’s most sought-after resources. According to Jean Rogers, Superior Court clerk of Crisp County, “The IT Department is very good about sharing their knowledge and expertise with nontechnical people. They will answer questions, and it gives you someone to bounce ideas off of. During our training, you can sit down one-on-one with them. You can’t pay for [help like] that.” Connie Cheatham, Superior Court clerk of McDuffie County, agreed: “All of the training the Authority offers has been great. And it’s not just for the clerks but also for our office staff. They’ve made it so much easier with resources like the webinars and the online training because we often can’t send our people off somewhere to train.” Charles Baker, Superior Court clerk of Hall County, added, “The Authority is tremendous with the training. They’re very hands-on, and they stay on the cutting edge of technology. Whether it’s Fines & Fees, Real Estate, or Notary online training, the Authority staff is so well educated.”

From in-house to online training, the GSCCCA offers the state’s Superior Court clerks a variety of options to hone their skills on a regular basis. Above, Communications Director Mike Smith monitors a webinar on advanced indexing of real and personal property records. To the right, in attendance at a 2006 clerks’ meeting to provide training, were (front row, from left to right) Mike Smith, Rachel Rice, Scott Jones, David Williams, Richard McPhaul, and (back row) Andy Wightwick.

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

Developing the Development Team Within the first few years after the Authority was established, technology

“Designers are well known for coming up with ideas at odd times,” recalled John Myers, hence some of the GSCCCA’s best-known programs were initially sketched out on restaurant napkins, hotel stationery, and whatever other paper was immediately available.

became a main topic of conversation. Barry Wilkes, Woodson Daniel, Gary Yates, and members of the board wanted to find ways to advance the Superior Court clerks’ technological resources. When David Williams came on board as executive director, he had the same goal in mind. By 1996 the Authority was working with Georgia Tech’s EDI to find ways to bring the clerks into

the

technological

age. John Myers brought in Tech student Andy

Board member Cindy Mason with real estate indexing standards experts Phil Kobierowski (center) and Gary Yates conference together regarding the index. Kobierowski, a technical consultant, was hired to build the database.

Wightwick to develop a website for the Authority and build a server that would provide the small office staff with access to basic email. “I was told to do it as cheaply as possible,” Wightwick recalled. “There were a lot of computer stores around, so I went out,

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CHAPTER TWO—THE ROAD TO YOUR COURTHOUSE DOOR IS GOING TO BE ELECTRONIC

got the parts, and built the server.” The proxy server became an Internet gateway for the Authority; the staff had to share the office’s one phone line to access the Internet and send email through the server. “It was slow, but it’s like any good thing—once you get a little taste, you want more,” Wightwick noted.

During this time, the Real Estate Deed Project was pushed to the forefront with the passage of HB 1613. The complex nature of the project, with information flowing from Systems Manager Eric Bolton at the console of the Authority’s data center in 2003.

While state-of-the-art at the time, the servers then had a total storage capacity less than roughly two hard drives of what a consumer could purchase today.

the Superior Court clerks’ offices to the Authority, called for the development of an entirely new system. The Authority decided

to leverage its relationship with EDI for the endeavor. “Those of us involved in the planning spent a lot of time together after hours having refreshments and talking about the numerous issues, needs, and

SUGGESTIONS WELCOME Because the Authority is focused on serving Superior Court clerks and its end users, suggestions from those individuals are always welcome. “On our website, a subscriber or casual visitor can leave a comment, good or bad, or a suggestion,” David Williams noted. “In many companies, these comments and suggestions go into a queue for review—usually by an intern or lower-level employee. With us, these suggestions and comments come to me. I review them and I meet with John Myers and Andy Wightwick, and we decide what action to take. We upgrade our

Authority staff meets regularly to incorporate customer feedback and develop new initiatives based on the changing environment.

programs and systems regularly and proudly incorporate customer feedback and suggestions into our products and technical decisions.”

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

challenges [of the system],” Myers said. “Designers are well known for coming up with ideas at odd times, especially in conversations with colleagues at bars and restaurants, where they grab the first piece of paper available—napkins, legal pads, envelopes, even the backs of receipts—and sketch out ideas.

We often sketched out graphics of the components, relationships, and flow of information expected to be incorporated into the deed system. It was a good way for everyone in the discussion to visualize an idea or concept being proposed and to identify whether or not the idea had merit and the content was correct.

It quickly turned the hypothetical discussions into reality and captured ideas for evaluation.”

The development process was intensive and brought together many great technical minds, led by Soon after she was elected as the Crisp County Superior Court clerk, Jean Rogers began working with Gary Yates to develop the real estate indexing standards. An early proponent of technology, she noted that the counties “cannot be islands unto themselves.”

Myers and George Olive. Andy Wightwick became a full-fledged member of the team, thanks to his experience with connecting people via the Internet; he had helped Georgia Tech develop its workfrom-home

initiative for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which allowed employees to use a dial-up bank to gain Internet access through EDI. Phil Kobierowski, a technical consultant, took on the charge of building the database based on the real estate indexing standards written by Gary Yates and the standardization committee. The team also included developers Mike Jones, Richard McPhaul, and later Scott Jones. Intermedia Communications was awarded the contract to build the statewide communications network; through that process, counties received either a 56K or T1 line for Internet access. Cott Systems received a contract to develop the website that would serve as the deed search portal for the counties. And Hewlett-Packard computers were placed in the clerks’ offices; the number depended on the size of the county and the expected volume of real estate deed filings.

Nicolina Montoro was hired as the Authority’s first customer support representative for the Real Estate Deed Project, dealing with customer calls from the original test counties when the pilot project launched in 1998.

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CHAPTER TWO—THE ROAD TO YOUR COURTHOUSE DOOR IS GOING TO BE ELECTRONIC

A PERFE CT PAR TNER SH I P Success often is described as having the right people in the right place at the right time. When the Authority began looking for an organization with which to partner for the UCC Project, Georgia Tech’s Economic Development Institute (EDI) seemed the ideal choice. “Georgia Tech is a top school for engineering, and its reputation is known nationally,” Andy Wightwick said. “It’s prestigious. When you need to create a one-of-a-kind system, you need to partner with the best people who have a proven track record in order to optimize the chances of success. Being able to leverage that type of resource brings value and credibility to your project.”

Georgia Tech research scientist John Myers’ involvement with the Authority began when the legislation for the Real Estate Deed Project was making its way through the Georgia General Assembly. Woodson Daniel and the board initially turned to the EDI team that had helped develop the UCC Project, but that team was unable to participate. The EDI’s director contacted Myers and his team, which included George Olive, Andy Wightwick, Phil Kobierowski, and others, to consider the project. “The rest is history,” Myers noted. “Good chemistry, a good definition of [the Authority’s] needs, and a fast response on our part allowed us to put together a prototype system for the demo to the legislature, which built the confidence that led to the passage of the legislation.” With a similar vision of what could be done in the future, the Authority established an ongoing, prolific, and highly successful partnership with Myers and his team from Georgia Tech. Ultimately, those individuals began working for Millennium Information Tek, which now handles all of the GSCCCA’s in-house technology needs and is owned

by Myers. The collaboration has become one of the most important relationships for the Authority, which heads into the coming times with the people who have been there and proven their proficiency, expertise, and loyalty for many years: the development team that understands the GSCCCA’s goals and wants to see the organization succeed. It’s a partnership for the ages, and its significance cannot be overstated.

John Myers’ relationship with the Authority began when he was a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech. He now runs Millennium Information Tek (MIT), which handles the Authority’s IT needs.

The relationship with MIT is considered one of the Authority’s most important.

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

The Authority began a pilot program of thirty counties on January 1, 1998, to test the technology. Experienced customer service representative Nicolina Montoro, who remains with the GSCCCA today, was hired to help process the incoming calls from the test counties, which helped the team identify and address any issues that arose. One year later, on January 1, 1999, the statewide system went live, bringing all 159 counties online.

Taking the Leap Before that crucial date, though, the Authority had to train the clerks to use the system and convince those who feared the major technological step that it was one worth taking. “I guess I was the first one to tell the clerks, ‘The road to your courthouse door is going to be electronic,’” said Jean Rogers, Superior Court clerk of Crisp County. She began working with Gary Yates to develop the real estate indexing standards soon after her election into office. “I said, ‘We have to get into this technology age. Our counties cannot be islands unto themselves. If we try to do that, then we are the weakest link for our counties and the citizens that we were elected to serve.’ That’s the way I felt about it, and I still do.”

Mike Smith, communications director and compliance officer, is

In time, all of the Superior Court clerks accepted the one of the earliest employees of the Authority and continues to

travel the state to help educate Superior Court clerks and other

real estate deed system and learned how to send indexing groups about the Authority. information to the Authority through their chosen land record

management system. For the board, Barry Wilkes, and David Williams, it was important that the clerks be able to choose the programs they used to collect and send that information. As long as the Authority certified it, each clerk could select any automated real estate records management system that could produce files in accordance with the standards and transmit them to the Authority at least once per day. “[The Superior Court clerks] have autonomy in their offices,” noted Mike Smith, communications director for the Authority. “They run their offices in the best way possible to serve the people who elected them. What the standards and the Authority and the projects for the Authority have allowed is to have state-level continuity while preserving the autonomy of the clerk’s office.”

The ability to make choices for their offices helped persuade the holdouts. Another attractive benefit was that the clerks were given access to email through the Authority’s new Internet-based continued on page 40

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CHAPTER TWO—THE ROAD TO YOUR COURTHOUSE DOOR IS GOING TO BE ELECTRONIC

THE WAVE O F THE FUTURE: THE EFI LE PROJECT Since its inception the Authority has remained on the cutting edge of technology, not only responding to the current technological demands of Superior Court clerks and the public, but also anticipating their future needs. That is why the GSCCCA began researching the possibility of creating a platform for individuals to file documents online long before the idea became a reality. In 2009 the Georgia General Assembly mandated that the GSCCCA develop rules and regulations for the electronic filing of documents. At that time the Authority already was involved in an extensive pilot project that involved planning, programming, and testing the eFile Project, which officially launched in 2010 with the electronic filing of UCCs. “From my perspective, the biggest advocate for the Authority’s involvement in eFiling was clearly Tom Lawler,” said Andy Wightwick. “He saw the benefit that eFiling would provide the clerks, and was vocal and insistent that the Authority build such systems. Tom set the goal that we have worked so hard to reach with our various eFiling offerings. Furthermore, Tom insisted that any eFiling service that the Authority provide should be free or as close to free as possible, rather than attracting the often significant processing fees that are associated with other similar systems. We are proud that we have been able to honor Tom’s commitment and offer payment methods that do not impose any processing fees above the base filing fee. Even when a filer chooses to make payment with a credit card, we only pass along our actual costs for processing the credit card transaction and do not profit from the transaction.”

Today, the Authority’s electronic filing portal, efile.gsccca.org, allows for the filing of UCC, real estate, lien, PT-61, civil case, and child support documents—and the list will continue to grow. In 2011 an eFile registry was developed to facilitate the registration, maintenance, and verification of real estate eFile participants, as well as provide a secure location for housing approved participants in the eFiling of real estate documents in Georgia. And with thousands of documents now being filed annually, the GSCCCA continues to assess and improve the user experience, completely revamping The eFile Committee worked for two years to develop the specifics for the Authority’s eFile platform and the rules and regulations related to the electronic filing of documents.

Under Tom Lawler’s insistence, the Authority’s eFile offerings have been either free or as close to free as possible.

38

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

its eFile website in 2013 to streamline the user interface and add a host of new features. Changes and refinements to the system demonstrate the Authority’s ongoing efforts to stay ahead of the curve and provide state-of-the-art services.

However, as Andy Wightwick noted, the main goal of the eFile Project is to continue to protect the autonomy of the clerks while giving the public access to convenient and effective tools. Although handled online, all filings are still managed through Superior Court clerks’ offices, meaning that the clerks remain the stewards of the records that are being filed. “We simply act as the front door to the clerks’ offices,” Wightwick said. “All files are still kept within their offices. They wanted an online filing system, so we worked closely with them to create a filing point. But we wanted people to know that they are still the ones doing the filing, so the portal we created places the clerks up front. For example, if you’re in Columbia County, there’s a picture of Cindy Mason on the portal there, so you know that you’re filing in Columbia County.”

As the eFile system was being created, the clerks had significant input regarding how it would work.

They also played a key role in deciding how documents would be indexed in the system, based on national legislative mandates for eFiling documents. Sheila Studdard, Superior Court clerk of Fayette County, and then board member David J. Burge, a partner with the law firm of Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP, chaired the Authority’s eFile Committee and helped generate a new set of standards that the clerks would use to file documents electronically. As with all of the Authority’s projects, the effort to bring the eFile Project to fruition was a collaborative effort—one that has been exceedingly successful and continues to thrive.

A placard announcing an eFile training session in Savannah.

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CHAPTER TWO—THE ROAD TO YOUR COURTHOUSE DOOR IS GOING TO BE ELECTRONIC

continued from page 37

system. “We were the only state agency with a connection into every courthouse in the state,” Wightwick observed. The system brought the clerks together in a way that had never been possible before, giving them a new vehicle for exchanging ideas for doing their jobs better. Instead of picking up the phone to call one clerk, they could send an “All Clerks” email to 159 clerks. “It was probably the best thing that any office had at that time. Of all the constitutional officers, no one had anything like that—not the sheriffs, the tax commissioners, or the probate judges,” explained Dwight Wood, Superior Court clerk of Hall County until his retirement in 2008. “We could send every clerk in the state questions and get input. It helped in so many ways.” Connie Cheatham agreed, stating, “It turned out to be another learning tool because somebody would have a question, and they’d get on and send out IT Manager Andy Wightwick’s technical skills have been invaluable to the Authority. Among his many accomplishments, Wightwick helped build the imaging system and wrote the specifications for submitting images.

an email to all of the clerks. And you’d get a lot of different answers. It made you think of all the different possibilities.”

Embracing the possibilities has been a central goal since the Authority’s establishment. That’s why the board has always looked for ways to improve the GSCCCA’s efforts, often changing the way it does things for the benefit of the clerks and its end users. For instance, when Jean Rogers recommended during the development process that the Real Estate Deed Project include images of the deeds instead of the index alone, the idea was fleshed out. As a former title abstractor, she understood that the people searching for the records typically need to see the physical document, and discussions with those end users showed the Authority how important that feature would be. “We sat down with the Realtors, the appraisers, and the surveyors,” Rogers noted. “Input from the users has always been an integral part of our projects.” Andy Wightwick helped build the imaging system and devised the image specifications that the clerks would use to scan and submit the real estate deed images so that the end users could access them quickly and easily through the Authority’s website. It was a key upgrade that changed the way people used the GSCCCA’s services.

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

On Its Own Of course, making a change like adding an image collection element to such a complex system is a major undertaking. While the Authority was working with Cott Systems as a vendor, those types of changes became even more challenging. While Cott wrote and implemented the software for the initial deed system, John Myers revealed, “We determined that the Authority would be better off if it controlled its own destiny as opposed to always working with contractors. The Authority is an organization that continually improves and evolves. And when you work with a contractor, every time you want to make a simple change, the contractor will say, ‘That’s not in the contract. We can do it, but it’ll cost this much more money.’ So we convinced the Authority that they would be better off if they had total control of their systems.”

The idea of the Authority managing its information technology needs in-house seemed possible because of the organization’s relationship with the team from Georgia Tech. Even while Cott remained as the GSCCCA’s main technology vendor, the Authority was able to accomplish major goals without its participation. For instance, when the concept of adding images to the Real Estate Deed Project was put on the table, the Cott team could not tackle the endeavor without a major change order. So Andy Wightwick and Mike Jones moved forward on their own, creating the imaging system that would allow the clerks to scan and send images of real property documents to be included in the database. It was a huge undertaking and a major success. That led to another in-house project: web-enabling the UCC database. While individuals could search the UCC system through the Superior Court clerks’ offices, they also needed the ability to access that information from other locations.

Wightwick spearheaded the effort to allow people to search the UCC database online. “Those projects opened the door for new opportunities,” Wightwick noted. “They demonstrated the ability of our in-house resources. We were building our internal capabilities with that streak of successes.”

When the contract with Cott Systems expired, the Authority’s board voted to bring the technology efforts inhouse permanently, choosing Millennium Information Tek (MIT) as the company to hire staff members and oversee the Authority’s project planning and development. Many of the team members from Georgia Tech had joined MIT as employees, so the decision was clear. Andy Wightwick would later become IT manager for the GSCCCA through MIT, and Helming the front desk at the Authority is Justine Brown, usually the Richard McPhaul would become the development manager.

first person a visitor meets when entering the offices.

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CHAPTER TWO—THE ROAD TO YOUR COURTHOUSE DOOR IS GOING TO BE ELECTRONIC

Starting in 2000 the new team made even more great advancements for the Authority, rewriting the core architecture for the database to make it scalable for future projects, as well as becoming the go-to technical resource for Superior Court clerks throughout the state.

IT Today Since 1999 the Authority has provided Superior Court clerks’ offices with more than five thousand computers, nearly six thousand monitors, and more than fifteen hundred scanners, in addition to other hardware and telecommunications resources.

GSCCCA Ombudsman Sharon Fort and Inventory Control Manager Richard Dunn coordinate the Authority’s Statewide Computer Replacement Project. Through this effort, over twenty-two thousand pieces of new equipment worth an estimated nine million dollars have been distributed to Superior Court clerks’ offices across the state.

Over nine million dollars has been invested in providing the extensive amount of equipment needed to allow the clerks to do their jobs more effectively. In total, the Authority has processed and shipped more than twenty-two thousand pieces

of new equipment, a feat coordinated by longtime Authority staffers Richard Dunn and Sharon Fort.

Additionally, the Authority’s IT staff is in contact with the clerks, as well as end users, on a daily basis, troubleshooting and helping to support their tech needs.

Ably managed by Nicole Whitfield and a team of technical support representatives, the Authority’s HelpDesk receives tens of thousands of calls each year. While a majority of those calls come from the business community, the clerks always have access to the customer service reps for any technical issues they have, from basic desktop support to problems with scanning documents and beyond. The IT staff also travels to all 159 counties to service equipment, which is eligible for replacement every four years. “Andy Wightwick made an office visit, and he looked at our real estate computer to see if it was up to speed. He checked our servers and said, ‘This isn’t pointing in the right direction,’” recalled Charles Baker, Superior Court clerk of Hall County since 2009. “He sent someone from the staff to replace my server, and my speed is back up—it’s like lightning. It’s great. They are willing to go to any county to help you out.” As Wightwick noted, “We want to help the clerks every single time they call.

We wouldn’t be here without them. We understand how important this work is, and we take it seriously.”

“I wouldn’t have the amount of equipment that I have now, and I would not have the IT assistance because, in my county, the IT Department serves both the city and the county, and there are only two people in the department,” said Authority board member Connie Cheatham of McDuffie County, 42

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

Connie Cheatham, Superior Court clerk of McDuffie County, was in on the ground floor of the early days of the Authority, attending board meetings even before she was officially on the board.

one of the state’s smaller counties, with a population of twenty-one thousand. Jean Rogers empathizes as the Superior Court clerk of Crisp County,

population

twenty-three

thousand. “My county could not afford the technical support that the Authority provides for me and for the two courts that I serve,” she observed. “The technology from the Authority has allowed me to do more with less.” That includes having a backup of all of her office’s records through the Authority, free of charge.

“My data is backed up every night, and I have the peace of mind that it is checked and it is there,” said Rogers. “If my courthouse burned down, I would get that information back.” The Authority routinely protects the data and images it receives from clerks using a variety of technologies. The process begins in the Authority’s onsite data center, which uses state-of-the-art, redundant, and fault-tolerant systems as primary storage. All data is first backed up to a disk system and then to a tape library. The tapes are stored in a fire safe in an offsite facility five miles from the main data center. Data also is sent to the Authority’s second data facility, located in downtown Atlanta, in real time. Additionally, the Authority began the MyVault Online Archive Service in 2007, with the goal of protecting all of the data in the clerks’ offices—even data that is not legislatively mandated to be sent to the GSCCCA but is in the stewardship of the clerks. More than 400 million files, a majority of them related to the Real Estate Deed Project, totaling over fifty terabytes of data are backed up nightly to yet another independent, offsite location. The entire process makes the Customer Support Manager Nicole Whitfield oversees a staff of five CSRs to handle the almost twenty thousand phone calls and seven thousand emails that the HelpDesk receives each year.

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Authority “disaster proof” in a sense, as every bit of data from the 159 counties can be reclaimed at any time when necessary.

“Tom Lawler understood the value of technology to Superior Court clerks, both politically and administratively, and promoted its use in many creative ways,” said John Myers. “He knew that the risk of catastrophic data loss had to be reduced or eliminated, and worked hard to develop and promote the Authority’s archive project, which provides free backup of local data in multiple locations. Once this project had been adopted by a growing number of clerks, Tom proudly told the board, ‘This is the most important project we have done.’”

To keep up with the clerks’ evolving needs, the Authority constantly assesses its technology and makes upgrades when necessary. It also makes changes based on the technology itself; while today’s technology is much more powerful, the footprint required to host it can be much smaller. For example, in 2010 the Authority’s IT staff condensed thirteen server racks into six server racks. Three years later, it was down to four. Ninety-two servers were reduced to sixteen physical servers (along with ninety-seven

Key to the Authority’s plans was a concerted effort to use technology to bring the Superior Court clerks themselves right to your computer desktop. To that end, a series of video profiles of the clerks was added to the website. Here, Sherry Long, Long County Superior Court clerk, is being interviewed by media professional J. J. Johnson.

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FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

Launched in 2012, the Clerks’ Authority Map Search application provides the most up-to-date and accurate real estate sales data in the state of Georgia, and is the only mobile app that provides real-time sales data based on the official source of property transfer tax data in Georgia.

virtual servers that required no footprint), yet the data center can manage and store more data than ever before. It also can support the nearly fifteen thousand subscribers who pay a monthly fee to have access to the GSCCCA’s website twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as well as the website itself, which receives nearly 1 million unique visitors each year.

Staying on the cutting edge is inherent to the Authority’s overriding goal: to provide Superior Court clerks with the resources they need to be successful. From redesigning the GSCCCA website to make it more user friendly to launching a major eFiling initiative to developing a mobile app that allows real estate professionals to search for and access real estate records from their smartphones, everything is done for the benefit of the clerks and the end users. “Technology changes, so the Authority has to reinvent itself completely about every fifth year,” Mike Holiman asserted. “It started out with a fax machine and a PC. Then it built from there, and now there’s a whole data center. Who knows what will happen. The data center may move to Mars. . . . I don’t know.”

“I’m famous for saying, ‘The technology’s the easy part,’” Wightwick said. “The technology is the easy part. Getting people to get on board is the really hard part. I’m impressed by the people who got everyone to work together, who went out there and trained and got all of the clerks to agree.”

45

When the Authority’s website and, later, the mobile app were launched, the old, dusty deed books became a thing of the past for any records less than twenty years old. Many counties are making a concerted effort to go back further, in some cases to the beginning of the recorded deeds in their locales.

GEORGIA SUPERIOR COURT C L E R KS ’ CO O PE R ATI V E AU T H O R IT Y F O R T H E R E C O R D — T H E U N I Q U E S U C C E S S S T O R Y O F T H E G S C C C A

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

It’s a Success Story

“You have to understand who clerks are,” Joanne Caldwell observed. “We are service people. We are elected to serve the people. And if we can do it in a new way, then that’s what we do.”

S

ince its inception, the GSCCCA has blazed new trails in so many arenas. It has attempted to try things that have

never been done, and it succeeded every time. While other states have tried to replicate the Authority’s success, none have been able to do so—perhaps because the GSCCCA has had to manage itself differently from any other state agency. “This Authority was given nothing in the beginning. Because the Authority had no money, all it had was a future revenue stream.

So I think that forced the organization from its beginning to operate in large part like a business,” Wright Banks said. “There wasn’t really any other way to operate. For every major project, the Authority was forced to leverage a very limited revenue stream going forward to carry a project out.”

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Barry Wilkes, Superior Court clerk of Liberty County, was elected in 2012 as the Authority’s third chairman. A former educator and newspaper editor, he said of the Authority: “Whatever we do, we do it for the benefit of everybody equally.”

The Authority’s need to function like a business made the board and David Williams think like business people. To keep overhead low, the Authority’s leadership made a concerted effort to maintain a small internal staff, contracting out work when necessary. They also managed to keep turnover very low by creating a welcoming work environment and strong culture, with employees and contractors staying on board for many years. What’s more, they knew when to pull back during the real estate downturn and the slumping economy, taking such proactive measures as temporarily suspending the Historical Deed Re-Indexing Project and shifting the equipment replacement program from a threeyear cycle to a four-year cycle to save the Authority’s financial reserves. By managing both its money and its talent so well, the Authority put itself in a position not only to survive but to thrive.

“It’s a success story,” contended Rogers, who joined the board in 2002. “One of the greatest compliments I heard was from a new board member, Jim Weidner, who was appointed by the governor.

He said, ‘I’m amazed. This Authority is the perfect example of how government should work.’ And I thought, Wow. We need to put that on the wall.” continued on page 52

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THE AUTHORIT Y IN ACTION: THOUGHTS FROM END USERS The GSCCCA’s services have given Georgia’s business community the ability to work smarter and more efficiently. From lawyers and bankers to Realtors and title examiners, countless professionals can use the Authority and its resources to serve their clients better in ways never imagined.

Liz J. Pope, of The Pope Law Firm, P.C. in Covington, uses the Authority’s website services for estate planning. When a couple comes into her office to write their will, she uses her subscription to the website to pull their property deeds while they’re in her office so that they can correct any issues and avoid probate should one spouse pass away. “It can make you a more effective lawyer who is better able to address your clients’ needs,” she noted. What’s more, the simplicity of the site is a true benefit. “It is an extremely valuable tool that is so inexpensive that any firm can use it. And it is extremely easy. My assistant learned the site in a day.”

Ease of navigation is one of the many benefits that Scott Swafford, chief credit officer at United Bank in Barnesville, points out when discussing the GSCCCA’s website. Having used the system for more than ten years to research UCCs, deed records, and more, he notes that the bank’s entire lending force and their assistants now access the site daily as well. “It is an efficient tool for those in the banking industry,” he explained. “It also has made banks more independent. We can do our own research instead of having to hire an attorney or another party to do the research for us. It gives us the ability to do our jobs more effectively, and it’s a system that the clerks should be very proud of.”

Bruce Hill, a tax appraiser with Appraisal and Real Estate Services of Georgia LLC, also has used the Authority’s website for years. When he contacted the GSCCCA to suggest that real estate transfer data be included on the site, he was pleasantly surprised to see a Premium Search option pop up on the website soon after. He can use the Premium Search to look up deeds and plats, as well as do a PT-61 Index Daily Search. “I can access the data directly from my desktop,” he observed. “If you are a business professional and you are not a Premium Member, you are missing out on valuable information, available right from your desktop. Some states do not have data like the PT-61 real estate transfer tax available to them, which creates a hardship for some segments. The GSCCCA is meeting the needs of various industries that rely on online data, and that will be their legacy.”

Liz Pope, an attorney in Covington, often taps into the Authority’s website to gather information for her clients. She is one of thousands of end users, who include not only attorneys but also real estate agents, tax officials, insurance personnel, and private individuals who access the site every day.

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The Record, a publication of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia, announced David Williams’ appointment as the new executive director of the Authority in 1995.

DAVI D WI LLIAM S: THE FACE OF THE AUTHORIT Y EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, J U LY 1 , 1 9 9 5 – J U LY 2 2 , 2 014 Through nearly two decades and three chairmen, the Authority had one constant: Executive Director David Williams. When the board began searching for a new executive director, Luke Flatt knew the perfect person for the job. David Williams’ work with the clerks to get HB 243 passed demonstrated his keen understanding of the Authority’s goals, and his dedication to moving the bill through the legislature endeared him to the clerks. When the opportunity arose for Williams, the decision was clear.

“Because of who approached me from the Authority board—Woodson Daniel and Luke Flatt—I was immediately interested,” Williams said. “After I met with them, I talked to Don Browne, a well-known and respected lobbyist who had worked in the banking industry for most of his career and then joined us at the GBA. His advice proved invaluable. He told me about how state authorities worked and made a comment that was, as I look back, very prophetic. He said, ‘In your life, your chance to grab the brass ring comes around but once. You’ve got to grab it and go for the ride, or you will forever live with the question of What if?’ And boy, was Don right. This has been quite a ride for the last nineteen years.”

After Williams joined the GSCCCA on July 1, 1995, his leadership was unparalleled. From his calm demeanor to his ability to work with everyone, his strengths helped the Authority become what it is today.

Sadly, the Authority lost its beloved leader on July 22, 2014. For two years, Williams bravely battled the rare combination of Parkinson’s disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease). While the ailments presented him with many physical challenges, he never allowed them to alter his unwavering commitment to the Authority. Every day, he made his way to the office and let his presence be known. He tapped into the tenacity and strong will that made him such an exceptional executive director and ensured that his personal struggle would not affect the people who depended on him and his guidance. Even in his final days, the GSCCCA was an important part of his life. David often said that his time at the Authority was the “job of a lifetime spent with the best people in the world!” And no one can explain his influence and impact better than the people who worked so closely with him.

Barry Wilkes, Superior Court clerk of Liberty County and current GSCCCA chairman—“If you had sat

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down and dreamed up what you wanted in an Authority director—everything that you hoped for, he had.

David had an unique ability to manage people. He was not a boss, per se. He was a team builder. His approach was always to get the most out of people so that they felt like they were part of the team and part of this family.”

Woodson Daniel, former Superior Court clerk of Pulaski County and the first GSCCCA chairman— “David was excellent. He knew how to use people to the best of their talents. He knew how to find the person or persons to fill a need.”

Sandra Glass, former Superior Court clerk of Oconee County—“There is nobody we could have gotten who could have done the job David did. His leadership was great. Everybody could work with him. The clerks, the bankers—he could work with anybody. He was just really the one who glued all of this together with all of the ideas the clerks had.”

Jean Rogers, Superior Court clerk of Crisp County and vice chairperson of the GSCCCA board— “Since he became the director, David Williams was the face of the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority. He was the administrative strength behind this Authority.”

John Myers, former principal research scientist at Georgia Tech—“Thoreau said that ‘the price of anything is the amount of your life that you exchange for it.’ Those who knew David knew how much of his life he exchanged for the Authority, and for the good of clerks, for two decades. His intelligence, thoughtfulness, and commitment were the essence of his leadership qualities. He inspired those of us who worked with him to do better in the pursuit of worthy goals, and he unfailingly showed his appreciation for our contributions . . . plus he was a fun guy. These are rare attributes but ones that have led directly to the Authority’s great success story.”

John Earle, executive director of the GSCCCA—“David really was the Authority. For nineteen years, he set the culture of the Authority, and was the hub for all the spokes.”

Andy Wightwick, Authority IT manager—“None of this would have been possible without David. He understood the clerks, and he understood their needs. He understood that one solution was not going to work for all of the clerks, and that there were going to be exceptions. He occasionally gave us direction that was contrary to our IT instincts, but it ultimately proved to be the right decision. He saw things where sometimes we couldn’t. I think it takes a special person to be able to do that.”

Mike Smith, Authority communications director and compliance officer—“David embodied what the Clerks’ Authority is all about: treat people with respect and compassion, and that will come back twofold.

His imprint on the Authority was immeasurable and will last forever with all of us who were fortunate enough to work with him.”

Luke Flatt, president and CEO of Community Bancshares Inc. and AB&T, Albany—“David had tremendous integrity. He said what he believed, and he believed what he said. He had a real vision for what the Authority could be. For him, it was never about money—it was about passion. It was about building something that would be helpful to people throughout the state. And he had a quiet tenacity. You know, he was a quarterback in high school. I can see him being a leader like that.”

Joe Brannen, president and CEO of the Georgia Bankers Association—“David never met a challenge he didn’t like. Together, we worked on all sorts of legislative issues. The legislation to create the Authority was his baby. It was his role to get it passed. He knew the clerks. He understood state government. And with a state authority, it’s complicated. But David saw ways to put it to work. He always asked, ‘What else can we do that’s beneficial for everybody?’”

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continued from page 48

The Next Generation According to Gary Yates, who retired from office in 1996 but remained with the Authority as a consultant, the future of the GSCCCA rests in the hands of the elected Superior Court clerks who are yet to come.

The visionaries behind the creation of the Authority did their part, and now it’s time for the incoming classes of clerks to take the lead.

“It will continue to take the support and cooperation of our clerks to maintain [the Authority]. It doesn’t happen all by itself,” he said. “They are participants in this cooperative. It’s not ‘them.’ It’s ‘us.’”

Since the very beginning, even before the advent of the Authority, the clerks of Superior Court in Georgia have embraced that collaborative and cooperative spirit. “When you become a clerk, you get a whole new family. And it is a family that is unbelievable. They are absolutely amazing,” Jean Rogers declared. And although the 159 clerks are elected officials who belong to different political parties, the differences never get in the way of coming together and getting the job done. “It’s not what’s best for you. It’s not what’s best for your party. When you become a clerk, that doesn’t matter. You leave the

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political party [at the door],” she added. “The ‘C’ comes before a ‘D’ or an ‘R.’ Being a clerk comes before being a Democrat or a Republican. You are a clerk. And I always thought that was a wonderful statement to make to a newly elected clerk.”

Every election cycle, those new clerks learn about the GSCCCA and what it has accomplished. Greg G. Allen, who became Superior Court clerk of Forsyth County in 2009, quickly realized the significance of what his predecessors had done on his—and all clerks’—behalf. “To think that a group of seasoned clerks of this generation, in an elected position, whose duties were codified over two hundred years ago, not only understood the radical change the world was experiencing but were able to see the future and harness technology to the advantage of the citizens of Georgia is nothing short of amazing,” he said. “We all owe a large debt of gratitude to the clerks at the time and those involved in the founding of the Authority who understood the enormity and importance of the change. The GSCCCA will continue to be a leader in innovative technologies to serve the citizens and will continue to adapt to offer the most up-to-date, affordable solutions to assist Georgia’s Superior Court clerks in their varied and diverse duties serving the needs of the people.”

Dana Chastain, Superior Court clerk of Fannin County since 2001 and

Greg G. Allen, Superior Court clerk of Forsyth County, took office in 2009 and is part of the new generation of leaders. He called it “nothing short of amazing” that the Authority’s founders were able to harness technology on such a grand scale.

Authority board member since 2013, agreed. “Being a small-town clerk, having budget issues and limited staff, the Clerks’ Authority has saved thousands of dollars for our county and helped my existing staff to be more efficient,” she noted. “The clerks of Superior Court have created something so spectacular, and the Authority is a relevant and necessary part of our counties and state. The Clerks’ Authority was created by clerks for clerks, and we are now sharing this creation with the world.”

“Our philosophy has always been that, whatever we do, it has to be for the benefit of everybody equally,” Barry Wilkes concluded. “That’s been part of our greatest success. Even though we were focused on projects and accomplishments, it’s always been about doing the right thing. If you do the right thing, you don’t have to worry about tomorrow.”

From its creative inception as a tool to serve the citizens of Georgia better, through the history of growth and successful projects described in this history, the GSCCCA has shown leadership in government service. The collective vision of the clerks, legislators, government leaders, bankers, Realtors, attorneys, and staff has been realized through this process of inclusion, communication, and collaboration. Today, the Authority continues to maintain its high standard of operation and commitment Superior Court clerks are on a four-year election cycle. This photo shows the latest group of new clerks to take office. Like all new clerks, they will undergo training with the Authority to learn the system. The next election will be held in 2016.

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Barry Wilkes and Gary Yates, who have been closely connected with the Authority from its earliest days, take a moment to reflect on the organization’s numerous achievements over the years.

IT’S ABOUT TIME The workload that every clerk of Superior Court assumes is astronomical. Their offices buzz with activity from morning until night as the clerks fulfill the responsibilities of their elected positions—and that’s what makes the accomplishments of the Authority that much more impressive. From the very beginning, the clerks have been willing to dedicate more time than they had in a day to ensure not only that the Authority was created but also

that its many projects succeeded. Often, personal time was—and still is—sacrificed for the good of the organization. For instance, Barry Wilkes served as director of the Authority twice—once as interim director when the GSCCCA was officially established and then again for several months before David Williams came on board; he ran the Authority from his office in Hinesville and drove to Atlanta weekly to oversee operations. In the early days, Joanne Caldwell spent evenings and weekends doing bookkeeping for the UCC Project, collecting fees from all 159 counties for two years—all without pay. Even after retiring as clerk, Woodson Daniel remained chairman of the Authority for five more years because there was “more work to be done.” In addition to providing free legal counsel, Tom Lawler walked the halls of the capitol every session for over a decade, lobbying on behalf of issues affecting clerks and the Authority. Even before she became a board member, Connie Cheatham attended nearly every Authority board meeting, driving more than one hundred miles one way to participate. When HB 1EX was moving through the legislature, Jean Rogers spent nearly two weeks straight separated from her family, staying in Atlanta to collaborate with the clerks and ensure that the vote tipped in their favor. Battling beside her were other clerks, including Cindy Mason from Columbia County, who lobbied on behalf of HB 1EX and later for passage of HB 198, the bill to remove the Sunset Provision. These are just a few of the many examples of people who have given their time and effort not only to their constituents but also to their colleagues to secure a bright future for the GSCCCA. Their energy, enthusiasm, and commitment, and those of every clerk of Superior Court in Georgia, have become a cherished hallmark for the Authority.

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to the citizens of Georgia. This is reflected in many of the observations included in this history, such as, “This Authority is the perfect example of how government should work” and “The GSCCCA will continue to be a leader in innovative technologies to serve the citizens. . . .”

As it continues to go about the business of public service, the Authority will be fueled by the energy and dedication of new clerks joining in the legacy that its founders created. New partners join in the process as the escalating needs of public service and government require the kind of innovative thinking and actions that have been the hallmark of the GSCCCA leadership. This story is being told to permanently record how vision, inspiration, and dedication can grow from one spark or idea to a highly respected reality. This story memorializes the actions of individuals who worked tirelessly and collectively to achieve a higher goal for the benefit of the citizens they serve. Finally, the story serves as an inspiration for others about what can be done when selfless commitment and experienced leadership combine to work for the future.

Former members of the Authority’s board were invited to join current members at their April 2013 meeting to honor longtime executive director David Williams. Front row: Brenda Weaver. Middle row: Dana Chastain, Sandra Glass, Joanne Caldwell, Connie Cheatham, Charles Baker, and Woodson Daniel. Back row: Jean Rogers, Jim Weidner, Dan Massey, Dwight Wood, Dan Jordan, and Barry Wilkes.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate photographs.

A AB&T, 9, 51 Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), 25–27 Allen, Greg, 28, 53, 53 Alston, Leighton, 3, 11, 14 app, GSCCCA, 46 Appraisal and Real Estate Services of Georgia LLC, 49 articles about the GSCCCA, 22 Atlantic Circuit District of Georgia, 5 B Baker, Charles, 28, 32, 42, 55 Bank of America, 14 Banks Jr., W. Wright, 11–14, 13, 16, 47 Barnes, Roy, 17 battles of the Authority, 20 beginnings of the GSCCCA, 11–16 Bleckley County, 15–16 board, GSCCCA inaugural, 3, 11 Bolton, Eric, 30, 34 Brannen, Joe, 7–8, 10, 51 brochures, GSCCCA, 27 Brown, Justine, 41 Browne, Dianne C., 15, 16 Browne, Don, 50 Burge, David J., 39 C Caldwell, Joanne, 3, 7, 10–11, 14, 15, 47, 54, 55 Carbon Sequestration Registry, 29 Center for Public Buildings, 18 chairmen, GSCCCA, 4–5 Chambless, Tommy, 9–10 change in the courts, 1–30 Chastain, Dana, 53, 55 Chatham County, 28 Cheatham, Connie, 1, 14, 26, 32, 40, 42, 43, 54, 55 Clark, Carol, 16 Cleland, Max, 10 56

Clerks’ Authority Map Search, 45 Clerks’ Reference Manual, 4 Cobb County, 15 Coleman, Terry, 25 Columbia County, 21, 39, 54 communication, power of, 11 Community Bancshares Inc., 9, 51 Cornerstone Communications Group, 9, 17, 21 Cott Systems, 14–15, 18, 35, 41 Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia, 2, 5, 8–9, 12, 16, 21, 50 Cox, Cathy, 24 Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee, 17 Criminal Justice Subcommittee, 17 Crisp County, 32, 35, 37, 43, 51 curve, being ahead of the, 17 D Daniel, Woodson, 1–4, 3, 4, 7, 7, 10–16, 25, 33, 36, 50–51, 54, 55 data center, 30, 34, 43, 45 Deal, Nathan, 28, 28 development team, developing the, 33–37 Dodson, Bill, 16, 18, 23 Dunn, Richard, 42, 42 E Earle, John, 26, 27, 29, 51 Economic Development Institute (EDI), 18, 33–36 eFile Committee, 38, 39 eFile Project, 38–39 electronics, the GSCCCA’s road to, 31–46 end users, thoughts from, 49 F Fannin County, 53 Fayette County, 39 Fines & Fees Division, 5, 25–27, 29 Fines & Fees Project, 24–25, 29 Flatt, James L. (Luke), 3, 7, 9, 9, 11–12, 14–16, 18, 50–51

FOR THE RECORD—THE UNIQUE SUCCESS STORY OF THE GSCCCA

Forsyth County, 28, 53 Fort, Sharon, 42, 42 future of GSCCCA projects, 38 G generation of clerks, next, 52–55, 52 Georgia Association of Realtors, 18, 28 Georgia Bankers Association (GBA), 3, 7–10, 50–51 Georgia Bureau of Investigation, 17 Georgia Forestry Commission, 29 Georgia General Assembly, 3, 17–18, 25, 27–28, 36, 38 Georgia House of Representatives, 17 Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), 18, 33, 35–36, 41, 51 Georgia Online (GO) Network, 8, 11 Georgia State Capitol building, 20 Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission (GSFIC), 12 Georgia Tech, 18, 33, 35–36, 41, 51 Glass, Sandra, 3, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23, 51, 55 Greene County, 11 Gwinnett County, 4, 6, 23 H Hague Convention, 19 Hall County, 28, 32, 40, 42 Harrison, Dunbar, 7 HB 1EX, 20–21, 25, 29, 54 HB 198, 21, 28, 54 HB 243, 9–10, 50 HB 1582, 17 HB 1613, 17–18, 34 HelpDesk, 35, 42–43, 43 Hewlett-Packard, 35 Hill, Bruce, 49 Historical Deed Re-Indexing Project, 29, 48 Holiman, Mike, 9, 17–18, 21, 25–27, 28, 29, 45 in-house, managing electronic elements, 41–42 House Judiciary Committee, 9, 27

I images, 6, 19, 30, 40–41, 43 indexing standards, 18, 23, 32–33, 35, 37 Intermedia Communications, 35 IT department today, GSCCCA’s, 42–45 J Jasper County, 1, 29 Jekyll Island Authority, 11 Johnson, J. J., 44 Jones, Mike, 35, 41 Jones, Scott, 32, 35 Jordan, Dan, 1, 3, 7, 11, 14, 29, 55 K Keesom, Peter, 19 Kobierowski, Phil, 33, 35–36 L Lawler III, Thomas C., 4–5, 4, 24, 27, 38, 44, 54 leap into electronics, taking the, 37–40 Liberty County, 2, 5, 28, 48, 50 Long, Aldridge & Norman, LLP, 8 Long, Sherry, 44 Long County, 44 M Maher, Julie, 25 Marchman, Ray, 3, 7, 11 Martin, Jim, 17 Mason, Cindy, 21, 33, 39, 54 Massey, Dan, 28, 55 Massey, Lewis, 24 McDuffie County, 1, 14, 32, 42–43 McPhaul, Richard, 25, 26, 32, 35, 41 Millennium Information Tek (MIT), 36, 41 Miller, Zell, 4, 10 Miranda, Maureen, 25 Montoro, Nicolina, 35, 37 Murphy, Tom, 17 Myers, John, 18, 33–36, 36, 41, 44, 51 MyVault Online Archive Service, 43 57

INDEX

N Newton County, 2 notary public, 19, 24, 32 Notary Public Division, 19, 19 O Oconee County, 11, 14, 51 Official Code of Georgia, 25 Olive, George, 18, 35–36 Olympics, Atlanta, 35 P partnership, perfect, 36 perception of the GSCCCA, 24–29 Perdue, Sonny, 27 Pope, Liz J., 49, 49 The Pope Law Firm, P.C., 49 Porter, DuBose, 25 PT-61, 29, 38, 49 Pulaski County, 1, 4, 51 R Real Estate Deed Project, 6, 16–24, 28, 31, 34– 36, 40–41, 43 real estate indexing standards, 32–33, 35, 37 Real Estate Transfer Tax, 29 Real Property Law Section, 16, 28 The Record, 8, 16, 50 Reichert, Robert, 17 revenue, raising, 6 Rice, Rachel, 32, 32 Rice, Tom, 28 Rockdale County, 7, 14 Rogers, Jean, 23, 24, 32, 35, 37, 40, 43, 48, 51–52, 54, 55 S schematics/diagrams of GSCCCA programs, 33 Sewell, Rusty, 8–9 Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP, 39 Smith, Mike, 32, 37, 37, 51 58

State Bar of Georgia, 8–9, 16, 28 Statewide Computer Replacement Project, 42 Stephens, Ovis, 8 Studdard, Sheila, 39 success story, GSCCCA as a, 47–55 suggestions, receiving, 34, 34 Sunset Provision, 28, 54 Superior Court Clerks’ Association of Georgia Inc., 4–5, 8 Swafford, Scott, 49 Swift, Jan, 12–13, 15 T Title 15 of the Official Code of Georgia, 25 Toney, James E. (Jet), 9 training, 5, 15, 23, 32, 32, 39, 53 Troutman Sanders, 14 U UCC documents, 6 UCC Project, 3–11, 14, 16–18, 20, 23–24, 31–32, 36, 54 Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), 1, 3, 6–10, 12–18, 20, 22–24, 31–32, 36, 38, 41, 49, 54 United Bank, 49 W Wachovia Bank, 12 Weaver, Brenda, 55 Weidner, Jim, 48, 55 Whitfield, Nicole, 42, 43 Wightwick, Andy, 30, 32, 33–36, 38–42, 40, 45, 51 Wilkes, F. Barry, 2, 4–8, 5, 10–12, 14–17, 20–21, 21, 27–29, 28, 33, 37, 48, 50, 53–54, 54, 55 Williams, David, 3, 6–7, 7, 10, 16, 18, 21, 24–27, 24, 28, 32–34, 32, 37, 48, 50–51, 50, 54–55 Wood, Dwight, 40, 55 Y Yates, Gary, 6–7, 11, 15, 18, 23–24, 23, 33, 33, 35, 37, 52, 54

Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority