A Visit to the Franklin County Recorder Office by APAPA Youth

On May 25 2018, the APAPA Ohio Columbus Youth visited the Franklin County Recorder’s office in downtown Columbus.

At 2:00 PM, approximately 20 people, mostly youth, as well as a couple parents, gathered near the security checkpoint of the building and were met by County Recorder’s office HR director Eric Sells.

In summer of 2018, APAPA Ohio is having its inaugural internship program, where API youth will intern at various legislator and government offices, to gain real life experience on how government works. Franklin County Recorder’s office is one of them, and Mr. Sells is instrumental in working with APAPA Ohio in establishing the internship program. Two of the APAPA youth will be spending 6 weeks and a more minimum of 120 hours as an intern, gaining real life experience.

Mr. Sells explained to the group that the county recorder office is responsible for recording, preserving, protecting and retrieving real estate, personal property, and other records. These important records include real estate transaction filings, living wills, and veteran military discharge documents. The recorder ‘s office also safeguards the property interest of the public, and makes the records available at any time, and can be accessed online and with the help of an employee.

During the tour, the group was shown both floors occupied by the office. It was fascinating to see that the office had many large bookcases, lined with heavy large books filled with information, sorted by year. These books hold real estate transaction fillings from as early as about 200 years ago. While at first the system may seem daunting, it is neatly organized, and records can be found in a reasonable amount of time. While storing information in books may seem “old school”, Mr. Sells explained that with the amount of information that was stored in books, it would be a costly, as well as time consuming, process to transfer all material in the books to online databases. Additionally, online resources cannot be depended on all the time, such as in the case of a power outage, or internet crash. And even more to the youths surprise, some records were even stored on microfilm! Some members of the group were so young, that they did not recognize that method for storing information.

Current incumbent County Recorder is Daniel O’Connor. He is running for the August 7th special election in Ohio's 12th Congressional District. Unfortunately he was not in the office during our visit.

Many youth and parents alike found the tour informative and interesting. Government offices no longer exists as an abstract and redundant bureaucracy outpost. As part of the nuts and bolts of the gigantic government machinery, the recorder’s office is an integral and important part of the Ohio state government.

More photos from the visit:

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