Sheesh. And I thought MY desk was messy.

[captainsblog]

Get a load of his:



County Clerk Chris Jacobs looks over boxes of the 96,000 real estate documents that have yet to be returned to attorneys.

The accompanying story tells this tale of what happens when you put a political hack in temporary charge of a vital government office:

More than three months of unopened mail sits in one room in the County Clerk's Office. Another room is filled with bins of real estate documents that have yet to be returned to attorneys. Some homeowners have waited more than a year to get their original deeds back after buying a house.

"It's just a nightmare," said Jacobs, a former Buffalo School Board member and real estate developer. "And it's unacceptable, and I think that it's solvable, too."

Jacobs, who took office late last year, has made addressing the real estate document bottleneck his top priority.

An entire year of mortgages, deeds and other real estate papers -- roughly 96,000 documents -- await verification with their electronically indexed versions before they can be returned.
...

Jacobs took over an elected office that had been vacant for eight months since [now Congresswoman] Kathleen C. Hochul resigned as county clerk after winning a special election last May to represent the 26th Congressional District.

The office, during that time, was run by John Crangle, the first deputy county clerk. Crangle, who is also Town of Tonawanda Democratic chairman, retired at the end of last year.

It goes on to describe a classic it-aint-broke-so-let's-fix-it mentality, in which the entire clerk staff, trained to process documents one way, were shifted into doing it completely differently, just as the head of the office left for Washington and a lame duck essentially put in charge of little more than padding his pension.

The consequences of unreturned originals are pretty meaningless; it's the imaged, recorded document that counts. No, the problem is those "three months of unopened mail." At least two of those pieces are mine, sent in December to save time and tickets downtown, which haven't shown up in their electronic docketing system AT ALL. None of them are life-and-death, but at least one deadbeat might be able to sell a piece of real estate without paying off my client's judgment while this delay goes on. And on. And on.