ELLSWORTH, Maine — In light of changes in state law and a recent state supreme court decision against his company, the owner of a Cumberland firm that had hoped to charge users to access deed-related documents on one statewide website is rethinking his business concept.
In Hancock County, officials are hoping the legal developments will enable the county to rid itself of a 2009 court order that resulted from its unsuccessful legal fight with the same firm. Hancock County was not a party to the March 27 Law Court decision that found in favor of six counties and against the firm, MacImage of Maine.
John Simpson, owner of MacImage, acknowledged Thursday that the Law Court ruling effectively renders his business plans unviable.
“It’s questionable that we could get anything of value by pursuing this further,” Simpson said.
MacImage continues to sell copies of deeds and related documents from Hancock County on its website for $0.25 per page and has between 300 and 400 regular customers, he said, adding that he has not decided to shut the service down. Still, he said, he is looking for a job that will provide him with a steady income.
Simpson had hoped that, by using Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, he could acquire digital databases of documents from registries of deeds in all of Maine’s 16 counties and make them available for a fee at his site. Instead of having to visit 16 different county-run websites to acquire copies of documents, real estate attorneys, land surveyors and other professionals could simplify their efforts by using his one, more user-friendly website, Simpson has said.
But Simpson faced resistance from counties he approached. He told them Maine’s FOAA law permitted him to get digital bulk copies of deed-related documents at cost and for far less than what the counties were charging on a per-page basis for printed copies. Counties countered that what they were charging was reasonable and that forking over such large quantities of documents at such a negligible price would have a significant effect on their county budgets and would result in higher county taxes.
Simpson had done work for Hancock County for about a decade, helping to maintain its registry of deeds website, before that relationship soured in 2008. In the fall of that year, he filed a FOAA request with the county, hoping to copy its entire digital deeds database essentially for free or perhaps for a nominal sum. His plan was to make electronic copies of those documents available to the public on his website for a fee.
In 2008, Simpson sued Hancock County in Cumberland County Superior Court after county officials told him he would have to pay $1.50 per page for either printed or electronic copies. Such a fee, Simpson argued, was far more than what the county needed to charge to recoup its expenses in maintaining and copying its digital database of documents. Paying such a fee would be prohibitive, he added, and therefore would constitute a denial of his FOAA request.
Simpson won the case, and in September 2009 Justice Thomas Warren ordered the county to provide electronic copies of its deeds and related documents at an unspecified lower cost. Before deciding the case, Warren had granted an injunction request from MacImage essentially allowing the firm to access the county’s digital database for a fraction of what the county wanted to charge.
Soon after winning the Hancock County case, Simpson sent letters to the 15 other counties in Maine with the same request — a digital copy of each county’s registry of deeds database, for which he would pay a nominal fee.
In November 2009, Simpson sued six more counties — Androscoggin, Aroostook, Cumberland, Knox, Penobscot and York — in Androscoggin County Superior Court, alleging that the fees those counties wanted to charge for digitized documents were unreasonable. The price that had been quoted by Penobscot County was $1 per page for 4 million pages.
In February 2011, Justice Warren again sided with MacImage and determined that each of the six counties were charging unreasonable fees.
The counties appealed.
The counties, in the meantime, also had approached the Legislature and in June 2011 the Legislature passed a law that set the relevant copying fees for registries of deeds at:
• $1 or $5 per page for paper abstracts or copies, depending on what kind of document is being copied.
• $0.50 per page for digital abstracts and copies.
• $0.05 per page for digital abstracts and copies of 1,000 or more consecutive records.
In addition, the Legislature made the fee schedule retroactive to Sept. 1, 2009, meaning that the counties could retroactively apply those fees to any such copies they had made for the public since that date.
The Law Court decision overturned Warren’s February 2011 decision and upheld the fee schedule established by the Legislature.
According to Simpson, even at five cents per page for bulk digital copies, the fees set by the Legislature make it cost prohibitive to obtain copies of deeds and related documents throughout Maine. He said it would cost him $2 million to copy all the counties’ digital deeds databases.
“That’s something that doesn’t make sense from a business perspective,” Simpson said. “We can’t pursue the [business] strategy we had hoped to.”
Steve Joy, chairman of Hancock County’s board of commissioners, said Thursday that the county has hired an attorney to get the 2009 court order reversed. He said that because Hancock County was not a party to last month’s Law Court decision, the county has to go back to court to make sure it is legally entitled to charge the fees set by the Legislature.
“We never should have lost that case,” Joy said referring to Warren’s Sept. 1, 2009, decision against Hancock County. “We’re trying to get an injunction as fast as we can.”
Joy said Simpson has been downloading documents from the county’s website for free for nearly four years. One thing the county hopes to accomplish by going back to court, Joy said, is an order that would require Simpson to reimburse the county at the rates set by the Legislature for documents that Simpson has downloaded since Sept. 1, 2009.
Simpson acknowledged he has not paid the county for any deed documents he has downloaded from their site but he said he has offered to do so and has never been sent a bill.
All the documents he has downloaded from Hancock County’s website, he added, are documents the county makes available for free on the website to everyone.
“What I am doing is what everyone else is doing,” Simpson said. “I’ve always tried to work with the counties. If [Hancock County] has any objection, they should call me.”
Follow BDN reporter Bill Trotter on Twitter at @billtrotter.
This is one of those rare moment’s when someone actually made the technology work for both the public and the private sector. What’s really sad is that Maine Govt’ is trying to stifle a business simply because the business is more efficient than Government is. People, it is time that Maine got out of the 1950’s and quit trying to live in the past. This case is a classic example of why Big Government is both outdated and just plain obsolete when it refuses to adapt to it’s citizen’s needs and society’s requirement’s. And no, I am not some USM sociology or poliitical science professor or grad student !
As much I hate to admit it, in this one case, Maine needs to get out of the way and let this type of business develop, either way it goes, as a signal that Maine can work with the private sector in developing new and innovative business concepts and idea’s. The digital recording of legal document’s has been going on for a very long time. The purchase and bulk transfer of them was an inevitability. The same document’s, now on the market as needed information for a host of everyday business requirement’s, are now available at a rate, if the article is correct, that is less than what the various County Office’s charge. If this isin’t an example of the private/public sector’s being able to work together for the benefit of everyone then I would be hard pressed to see a better one. That the Counties are crying about their loss of revenue from the fee schedule is both tragic, since it was seen coming and the Counties had every opportunity to get ahead of it long before this, and an example of just why so many people are getting ‘cranky’ about the cost of Government when everyday technology is available to reduce the cost of Government. As technology advances, even in Maine, it’s effects are going to be felt. The real trick is to be able to adapt and innovate these new technology’s into our State and make them both a work / job source for us and to not be afraid of them. But it requires us to realize that the world is moving on, no matter how much we wish it wasn’t.