The Register of Deeds--The rest of the story | Eastern North Carolina Now

The protection, safekeeping and prompt availability of vital documents is important to the public interest.  Long delays in establishing title, and inheritance can cause damage to commerce and impact the value of estates.  The ability to access documents readily is a right we have had for hundreds of years.  To change the system by putting it at risk only because one individual thinks we should do it does not make sense.

Electronic recording requires electricity.  When the internet is not available both recording and access stops. Not having electricity is not the only risk with this complicated cloud system that only a few people can understand and even fewer can make work.

As long as the power is on, we will be fine.  It is during times of emergency, both short and long periods, when power is not available or the internet is not available, or there is sabotage of any critical part of the system does not work that serious harm can be done to our way of life.. We need to be able to function under the worst of conditions. Biden has allowed 8 million immigrants into the USA.  We have no idea how many terrorists are. With large numbers of immigrants who do not subscribe to our way of life we should consider the possibility of Gaza here in the United States.  My issue is about reducing risk.

Eight months ago, 60 Minutes did a story on the vulnerability of the nation’s power grid. 

Filing important documents in places that are not physically accessible offers trouble makers the opportunity to do great harm.  The risk is not only not having electricity.  Solar Magnetic storms, sun spots, atomic bombs and electromagnet pulse (EMP) attack, hackers, outages of the internet or satellite systems and sabotage create more and more risk.  I advocate using electronic filing systems, along with the one sure system protects these documents.  That backup is the hard copy deed books we have historically had.  The military can shut down the internet and satellite communications at any time for national defense purposes.  I can see situations where it is on and off for many periods of time during several months for a variety of reasons.  We presume the bad guys will not get control.  That is a risky assumption. We have already seen the entire nation put at risk because of the hacking of control systems for a major east coast pipeline.  We should never give up our hard copy filing system. 

Let me oversimplify the problem.   The issue is how we are going to protect valuable documents is the power grid is disrupted.  The problem is not whether to use electronic or hardcopy record storage.   The is is how we prepare for a collapse of the power supply. 

Hard copies of deeds have not been filed in Beaufort County since January 5 of this year.  That is five days after Carolyn Garris became Register of Deeds.  Part of this problem is that the new appointed Register of Deeds is simply clueless about her duties or how government works.  She got off to a bad start when she deceived the Republican Executive Committee about the Register of Deeds vacancy when Jennifer Whitehurst retired at the end of 2022.  Garris is and was Chairman of the Beaufort County Republican Executive Committee.  That group nominates someone to fill a vacancy in the office of Register of Deeds.  The Register of Deeds job pays about $70,000 per year.  Carolyn Garris mislead the Executive Committee and applicants for the Register of Deeds job so she could get the job.  She has no experience that would qualify her to be Register of Deeds.  Carolyn Garris is a native of New Jersey and has no loyal roots to our North Carolina heritage.

Upon becoming the Register of Deeds, she, within four days, stopped recording deeds on hard copy.  She had no authority to do this.  Her actions violated the County Budget Ordinance.  The Register of Deeds office is funded by Beaufort County taxes collected by the Board of County Commissioners. State law requires that all expenditures for every county be enacted within a budget ordinance.   This is to keep county officials from requesting funds for one thing and then doing something else with that money.  Sounds like Carolyn Garris doesn’t get it. The Board of County Commissioners was never informed that we would change the way we record deeds.  Again, the issue as I see it is not whether to use the electronic system but rather whether the County will maintain an adequate back up system in case the electronic system goes down. 

Garris apparently is clueless about the threats, such as those reported by 60 Minutes in the video above, present to people having access in a timely manner to these records.  The time has past to argue about whether or not the power grid will be attacked.   It has already been attacked!   And the number of instances of attacks on the grid has been growing every year.   Thus, it is not an issue of whether the grid will go down, but rather when it will go down and for how long.  Apparently Garris did not consider this issue when she made the decision abandon the hard copy system.  And the majority of our County Commission is equally clueless about this risk and what it means to the people of Beaufort County. 

January of 2023 is the middle of a budget year. The budget year begins July first of each year and ends the last day of June the following year.  Making the change in the middle of the budget year makes no sense.  Again, Carolyn Garris failed to make the Board of Commissioners aware of any changes in her Department during the preparation of the 2023-24 budget. Obviously, it takes much less labor to record online than it does to record hard copy.  Why was her budget not adjusted for the 2023-24 budget year?

The representation that there is no room in the Register of Deeds Office for hard copy books is not true.  We are producing about 40 books per year, Conservatively we have eight more years of available space at that rate.  I invite you to visit the Deed vault and see for yourself.  It is open to the public 8 hours each day.

The gang of five, without taking the time to get any facts, started circling the wagons around Carolyn Garris when I brought the hard copy issue up at the October Commissioners meeting.  Their defense is purely political.  Garris is Chairman of the Beaufort County Republican Party.  John Rebholz and Randy Walker are dependent of her support to win their commissioners seats in 2024. Frankie Waters sits on the Executive Committee even though he donated money to the Democrat Candidate for Sheriff during the 2022 elections.  Commissioners Booth and Langley are having a good time playing the three RINO’s for suckers to keep the Republican Party split.  The three RINO’s do not have a majority unless at least one of these Democrats votes with them.  Rebholz and Frankie Waters return the favor by voting for Langley to be Vice Chairman.  These are the same kinds of problems real Republicans have in Raleigh and Washington, DC.

We have a register of Deeds who did not told the truth to get the job of Register of Deeds, has not told the truth about the availability of space in the Register of Deeds Office nor does she have any plan for how to deal with a collapse of the power grid for an extended period of time.  She has not told the truth during the budget process in adjusting her staff level based on the amount of work.  She violated a law, the budget ordinance, when she stopped making hard copies of deeds in spite of the fact that the County Commissioners had mandated a paper record backup system by appropriating tax payer money to do just that.

I am being accused of having a vendetta against Carolyn Garris.  Yes, there is bad blood.  Garris informed me that I no longer had ex-officio rights at the Executive Committee. Those rights come with my election to public office as a Republican. She ousted me from several meetings.  One of those meetings was when the $14,000.00 that was raised to support Beaufort County Candidates was sent to Raleigh.  This was done to deny conservative school board candidates, commissioner candidates and the conservative sheriff help in their campaigns.  Frankie Waters was the only RINO favored by Garris who was running that year and he was giving money to the Democrat candidate for sheriff. To this day I do not get notices of the Beaufort County Executive Committee meetings.  I do not watch her any closer than I do any other elected official. She is not the only official I have complained about.

Carolyn Garris was on the agenda to answer for her actions at the October public meeting of the County Commission.  She has been to every other commissioner meeting but refused to attend the October meeting.  She will be on the November agenda. Let us see if she shows up and explains her action to the Commission and the public.

I have no doubt that Commissioners Randy Walker, Frankie Waters, John Rebholz, Ed Booth and Jerry Langley will back her to not make hard copies of deeds.