Annual Report of the Nassau County Clerk’s Office

Dear Resident:

I am pleased to provide the Annual Report of the Nassau County Clerk’s Office for the fiscal year 2007.

Created by State Constitution, this office has unique duties pertaining to indexing real property ownership records and court records for Supreme and County Courts.  These records must be reviewed for statutory compliance and retained in perpetuity.  In addition, the County Clerk is responsible for safeguarding the vital historic records of the County as well as the storage and retrieval of records belonging to most of the other county departments.

Although one of the most public offices in Nassau County government, the matters we handle are of a personal nature to the hundreds of residents who cross our threshold daily.  My dedicated staff assists individuals with court filings, name change orders, deeds, mortgages, judgments and liens, business certificates, notary public requests, passports, and veteran’s discharge filings each and every day.  Accordingly, the Clerk, as agent, exercises a non-delegable fiduciary duty as a collection agent for funds generated by these services on behalf of and disbursed to other taxing jurisdictions and the Unified Court System.

The Clerk’s office has been able to achieve real time recording of real property instruments.  In addition, we have commenced back file conversions of old records maintained on other media to a digitized format.  With the assistance of the New York State Department of Education State Archives program, the County Clerk’s Office was awarded a grant for $40,000 to purchase software and equipment to convert hand written property cards that serve as an index for land records prior to 1992 to the present electronic platform. The objective for this year will be to continue the back file conversion. My ultimate goal is to create one centralized electronic format for all land records from 1899 to the present.

Additional goals for the Clerk’s Office now, as was throughout last year, are the continuation of implementation of available technology, responsive constituent services, office efficiency and productivity, and privacy protection.

Further, in partnership with the Unified Court System, we are working to expand its e-filing pilot initiative, which allows for recording documents through electronic submission. By year’s end, this office processed 37 files electronically.  As of this writing, more than 180 files have been processed electronically.  In addition, Tax Certioraris increased more than 225% in 2007 (from 4,558 in 2006 to 14,837 in 2007); many of these Tax Certioraris were filed electronically. 

Cognizant of this office’s statutory obligations, I am hopeful that the County will provide the necessary resources thereby allowing the Clerk’s Office to fulfill its professional and fiduciary obligation to the residents of Nassau County.