Municipalities have until Sept. 1 to apply for grants to digitize their land records, part of a program to ease the burden on clerks and people seeking documents during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The grants — which are capped at $20,000 — were established by Act 137 in July and are administered by the Department of Taxes, using money received through the federal CARES Act.
Legislators allocated $2 million for the project, meaning 100 towns, cities or villages could receive money.
“The goal of the program is to digitize as much as the land records in Vermont as possible in order to reduce the amount of in-person consultation that’s required to complete a real estate transaction,” said Doug Farnham, deputy commissioner of taxes.
Attorneys and real estate agents often need land records, Farnham said, and obtaining them have become cumbersome because of pandemic-induced restrictions at municipal buildings.
Vermont lags behind other states in getting documents online, Farnham said, an issue highlighted by the coronavirus crisis.
He said only about 40 of Vermont’s 255 municipalities have digitized their land records. As of Tuesday, 18 had applied for grants to join that list.
And the program may help more than just the real estate business: It may allow small, rural towns to begin moving land records online for the first time.
Take Danville, one of the 18 municipalities to apply; it keeps land records dating back to the 1700s.
“We’re completely old-school here,” said Wendy Somers, clerk of the Caledonia County town. “We’re card files and books, and the only thing that is online actually is our tax maps.”
Those online maps show rough shapes of parcels and their abutting addresses — so further details require further records.
Typically, multiple people at a time would be in the clerk’s office research room examining documents, she said.
But the office closed to the public after Gov. Phil Scott’s stay-home order. Town workers started sending records via email — and still will — though it detracts from their normal duties.
“It was slow … but we were offering that at no charge just to try to keep things going,” Somers said. “Because I think during the pandemic, there were a lot of people doing refinancing of their homes. So I think it was kind of important.”
In the last week of May, Danville officials began making two appointments a day, three days a week. The limits on appointments has meant fewer people than usual can view records each week, and town officials have to do a time-intensive cleanup after each visit.
“We have to go through and completely disinfect the place,” Somers said, listing items to clean: tables, chairs, doors, the records vault.
Receiving the grant would ease the burden on all fronts. Somers said the town applied for the full $20,000, which her office will use to pay for licenses, computer stations, a scanner and a contractor to digitize the first five years of records.
“That’ll kind of jumpstart us to continue with whatever money is left over,” she said. She plans to pay a staffer to continue digitizing records.
Farnham, the deputy tax commissioner, said that because of their pandemic workloads, some municipal clerks had been stressed about the grant application before even looking at it
But he said the application is short and straightforward and the grant money will go out when projects are done — so it’s based on actual costs, not estimates.
And if local officials aren’t able to pursue their proposals, “that’s fine,” he said. “We just need to know which towns want to do this.”
As with other CARES Act–funded programs, project money must be spent before the end of December. To qualify for the grants, the municipal efforts have to be running by Nov 1.
Besides Danville, these 17 municipalities had applied: Barnard, Barton, Brandon, Calais, Cambridge, Clarendon, Fairfield, Johnson, Lyndon, Marshfield, Milton, Moretown, North Hero, Randolph, Rockingham, St. Albans City, Thetford, Walden and Weathersfield.
