County Commissioners Respond to Recorder of Deeds Candidate

During Wednesday's Chester County Commissioner's Sunshine Meeting, Recorder of Deeds candidate Russ Phifer accused County Commissioner's Ryan Costello and Terrence Farrell of supporting a program that allows users to access the County's search database for free.

According to Phifer, the "program" is costing Chester County hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue.

In a press release, Phifer stated, "A review of account records makes it obvious that the free 'back door' you provided to ChescoPin is primarily being used by county law firms for routine searches."

The press release goes on to say that Phifer estimated that as many as 30,000 unbilled searches have been made under this "program."

During Thursday's regular meeting of the county commissioners, Costello and Farrell asked county chief information officer Glenn Angstadt about the issue.

"We're in the process of fixing it." Angstadt said.  "In March of this year we got a report about users being locked out of the system.  After investigating the problem, we located this free account that allowed users to see other information for free."

Angstadt also said that his office had been working on a fix for the problem since July.

"Programming and fixes like this take a long time," Angstadt said.  "But, we plan to have it all worked out by Oct. 7."

Angstadt also said that between 2001-2006 the search database was run by an outside vendor, and that any changes that his department wanted or had to make had to go through the third party.

"Right now, there are 6,910 users registered to use the ePin," Angstadt said.  "That number stays pretty constant.  This is a problem we came aware of while we were troubleshooting another problem, and we'll have it fixed so people will be able to just search real estate data."

"I just want to clarify that this is something you have been working on since before yesterday," Costello said.

"Yes, that is correct," said Angstadt.