Recorder will not manage computer program

Monday, Aug. 18, 2003 | 11:09 a.m.

The Clark County recorder, at her own request, will no longer be the manager of a program to computerize the office's millions of documents.

Clark County Assistant Manager Rick Holmes said a staff member from the county's Information Technology Department will take over the task, which had been one of Recorder Fran Deane's tasks. Deane has sharply criticized the Virginia-based company, AmCad, over its $4.9 million contract to index nearly a century's worth of land, marriage and birth documents and make them accessible through the Internet.

In a letter to the county last week, the company said that delays in installing the hardware and software would push the cost of the project to $7.2 million. The company also said Deane has created a "disruptive and hostile environment" contributing to the delays and cost overruns. Deane told the Sun she had purposefully impeded the the project to protect taxpayer interests.

Holmes has said the county and company are not in an adversarial relationship and the issues, including the cost increases, will be targeted in ongoing talks. The contract to install the system is now suspended but not canceled, Holmes said.

The county vetted AmCad's work with other governments around the country and found other government agencies gave the company high marks, Holmes said.

Deane said the company's products and service have not been tested at a high-volume recorder's office such as the one in Las Vegas, which handles up to 4,000 title documents in a day.

In a related issue -- Deanes' aborted proposal to create an independent, for-profit company that would provide access to documents for the public for a charge -- Clark County Assistant District Attorney Mary Miller said her office has no follow-up beyond letting the recorder know that such a move would violate state statutes.

Miller said Deane needs to do three things:

"Given that she hasn't, as far as we know, taken any affirmative actions on that, we're not taking any follow up unless we get some new information," Miller said.

Stacy Jennings, executive director of the Nevada Ethics Commissions, said she was not aware of the details and would not confirm or deny the existence of an ethics complaint.

She said a public official cannot by law profit from her position, but in a hypothetical case where no profit was made, an ethical problem may not exist.

"There's a big step between thinking about something and putting the wheels in motion," she said. "If they haven't actually gained anything from it, then there might not be a violation."

Deane said no one from county management or the district attorney's office told her that there may be an ethical problem with going into business to sell recorder information. County managers and Miller say they did inform Deane that the action would raise ethical red flags.

Deane said her primary concern is not making a profit from selling the information -- although she does not feel there is anything wrong with that -- but providing quality access for the public at low cost.

She said other systems would provide the same or better service at lower cost than the AmCad system, which was selected by her predecessor in the office last year.

Deane said Friday that she now is resigned to putting the AmCad system in place. The county has already paid the company more than $3 million for indexing and cataloging some documents, although millions more documents remain to be processed and more work has to be done to bring the information online.

She said placing someone else at the helm of the project makes sense. Deane said she asked the county manager to replace her as project manager "since I felt this getting out of control and I felt I didn't have the power to stop it.

"I don't feel comfortable in this environment," she said. "I'm not a techie. I smell tax-dollar waste, but I'm not a techie."

Richard Morgan, dean of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Boyd School of Law and chairman of a county task force on ethics issues, said the recorder's issues would come up when the task force discusses conflict-of-interest issues.

"We have been talking about conflict of interest, and this is a situation that raises conflict of interest," he said.

Morgan said that one of the recommendations likely to come from the task force is training for public officials on what constitutes a conflict of interest. Deane, by her own admission, is a newcomer to government conflict-of-interest issues.

The task force is scheduled to meet next Sept. 9.