Wayne Coates, Hamilton County OH Recorder put out a public memo this week that his office is NOT going to be open on Friday anymore due to the County Commissioner's decision to reduce his budget for the 4th year in a row. His 2013 budget has been reduced by 24.8% over 2012. He requested that any comments be made to the 3 County Commissioners and gave their names and phone numbers so I called them to explain how detrimental this is going to be and followed up with a long email to all of them. Then I got a meeting with Wayne Coates and we spoke for 30 minutes. I tried to suggest compromised solutions such as closing the recording desk, reception desks and other things but still allowing abstractors inside to do their jobs. Limited access is much better than no access. He was very nice and listened well but it seemed like none of my suggestions were going to work. He explained that his office is processing the same amount of documents as he did 4 years ago with literally twice the staff but now they are going to have to do that in 4 days instead of 5, which he said was impossible. As a result, he said they were going to fall more and more behind with recording/imaging documents and that they would never catch up and in fact it would get worse and worse as the months go by. Good public record keeping is vital to this country.

If anyone want to add their voice to help stop this please call and/or email the Commissioner's and request that they increase the budget for the Recorder's Office.

Here is the contact information:

Commissioner Greg Hartmann: greg.hartmann@hamilton-co.org  513-946-4405

Commissioner Todd Portune: todd.portune@hamilton-co.org   513-946-4409

Commissioner Chris Monzel: chris.monzel@hamilton-co.org   513-946-4401

County Administrator Christian Sigman: christian.sigman@hamilton-co.org   513-946-4420