By Thomas B. Langhorne, Evansville Courier & Press
EVANSVILLE - An idea Vanderburgh County has studied for years - court records widely available on the Internet - becomes a reality today.
Vanderburgh County announced Monday that electronic records for criminal and civil cases dating from 2005 to the present will go online this morning on the Web site of a private firm that already posts court records online in 47 other Indiana counties.
Data for more than a million cases for which computerized records exist, dating to January 1993, will be loaded continuously into a database operated by Richmond, Ind.-based Doxpop LLC with the goal of completing the work before Christmas.
But access to all but limited information on pending cases and court calendars will cost you.
Rather than have the county pay start-up costs, estimated to be as high as $250,000, Vanderburgh County agreed last year to let Doxpop absorb the costs and attempt to recoup them through subscriptions.
Nick Fankhauser, vice president of product development for Doxpop, said subscription prices can go as high as $500 per month for heavy users, such as background check companies. Most attorneys and abstract companies will pay $50 to $100 monthly.
But individual residents can get off a lot cheaper.
"It depends on how much access you need," Fankhauser said.
"A minimal user can pay $30 a month, pay-as-you-go, no long-term commitment, which might be good for the individual involved in one case who needs to follow it."
A one-time "single-case subscription" costing $40 also is available.
"An example might be someone who's involved in a divorce that unfortunately may drag on for a year, and they don't want to keep ponying up $30 per month," Fankhauser said.
"They ID the case and we essentially flag their account so that whenever they log in, they can only see that one case from that point forward.
"While we make most of our money from working with attorneys and professionals, we have enough inquiries from individuals that we've done a few things like this to try and serve the general public, as well."
But some don't see why court records cannot be offered online free of charge, as agencies such as the county assessor's office does.
Cheryl Musgrave, who served as Vanderburgh County assessor from 1995 until 2005, was the first county assessor in the state to put property tax assessments on the Internet. As commissioner of the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance in 2007, Musgrave had assessed valuation and historical tax bill information for about 4 million parcels statewide posted for free access on the state agency's Web site.
"I am saddened the public will not have full and free access to the records their tax dollars paid to create using property tax money, paying the salaries of every employee at the clerk's office and the judges' offices, though not the judges themselves," Musgrave said.
As a county commissioner in 2005 and 2006, Musgrave said, she wanted to make online access to Vanderburgh County court records free to residents.
"But you would have to pay to look at other counties," she said.
"The proposal wasn't brought forward to us."
Current Assessor Jonathan Weaver said his department's Web site offers free access to a wealth of data about 81,000 parcels.
"You can see who owns any property in Vanderburgh County," Weaver said.
"If it sold recently, you can find out the sale price. You can do a comparable sales search comparing your property to others.
"The Realtors, the appraisers, bankers, anybody associated with housing - they would croak if the county charged a user fee."
But Timothy VanCleave, executive information technology director for Vanderburgh County Courts, said comparing that agency with county departments that offer data free online is an iffy proposition because they use different database software providers.
VanCleave said the expense for the new online court records initiative comes in extracting data for more than 1 million criminal and civil cases from Vanderburgh County Courts' computerized court case management system database.
"In order to extract the information in a usable format out of (the courts system's) case management system, the cost the county would have had to bear was more than what elected officials wanted to address over time," he said.
"The return on the investment (in savings from reduced employee workload) did not overcome that expense."
The new initiative eases a loss for County Clerk Susan Kirk, who already had disclosed plans to close a library of six free public-access computers used for looking up case information to shift the employee supervising it to fill a vacant small-claims clerk position she called indispensable.
It comes as Indiana Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard continues to pursue a separate project, through the Judicial Technology and Automation Committee, to link Indiana courts electronically and post their case records online free of charge.
But that project relies on a different case management system, Odyssey, from a different software database provider, Tyler Technologies.
Shepard has proposed linking all Indiana courts by 2015, but the judicial committee and Doxpop have not struck an agreement on how the private firm would be able to interface with the state's Odyssey system. For the time being, local users could not access Odyssey's court records through Doxpop.