Lake County Recorder Lori Ekstrom gave her final annual update at last week’s County Board meeting, closing out around 31 years at the office once her elected term ends later this year. She took the opportunity to give a little extra to her presentation, combining the annual statistics with a look into the office’s history as well as her recommendations for future improvements.
She began by noting that Lake County’s Recorder’s Office is actually a three-in-one operation, also being the County’s Registrar of Titles and Registrar of Vital Records. As such, the office handles a range of documents from Certificates of Title and other real estate records to marriage licenses to birth and death certificates, just to name a few. Their mission is to provide an accurate and timely turnaround on the processing of these documents and preserve and protect a record of them once processed. They then do what they can to make those records easily and quickly accessible to parties seeking the information within, whether for business or, in the case of public records, curiosity.
Ekstrom gave some overall figures for what the office has covered in the past few years, with them having issued 296 Certificates of Title and 2,834 total documents in 2024 and 323 Certificates of Title and 2,953 total documents in 2025. Roughly 60% of these in each year were done electronically. 2026 so far, she said, is shaping up to be “pretty much the same. It’s been a little slower in the past few years with the higher interest rates and the real estate sales slowing down.” Although overall documents processed gives some measure of the workload the office is taking on, she warned that the reality of it was more complex, as “two documents may take very different amounts of time and staff to process and preserve.” As an example, a Satisfaction of Mortgage document “is very simple; it takes two minutes”; meanwhile, a Torrens title document “could take two weeks to process.”
The office has several ways in which it records revenue, with its General Revenue coming in around $45,500 in 2024 and almost $48,000 in 2025 from around 14.50/13 per document processed, and 2026 shaping up to be in the same range. The Recorder Technology Fund and the County Compliance Fund are each taking in typically in the $25,000 – $32,000 range annually, with both increasing slightly from 2024 to 2025. Lastly, the County’s use of the iDocMarket program to allow public access to records makes around $34,000, with the amount going down from 2024 to 2025.
A goal for Ekstrom in this presentation was to provide recommendations for use of both the Recorder Technology Fund and the County Compliance Fund after her departure. She began with the Recorder’s Technology Fund, whose reserves balance is currently sitting at $380,494. In short, the funds are used at the Recorder’s discretion for modernizing the County’s land records systems. This includes upgrading equipment and software relating to real estate, including Geographic Information Systems (GIS), making digital backups of historical documents, and most recently adding the Document Alert Fraud Service. So far, the fund has allowed the office to make good headway on better cataloguing the documents. Ekstrom used GIS as an example, explaining it allows the public to look up a parcel, zoom in on features, and review related documents with ease. Aside from these improvements, however, she had one caution and several ideas to take the fund’s money farther.
The caution was a simple reminder of a software contract needing renewal by the end of next year, which would need to be accounted for by her successor. The ideas were largely to use the fund to help with projects currently underway. The office’s ongoing efforts to add digital backups still have a hefty total of 20,000 historical Torrens documents left to scan, image, and index. “That’s a timely process because they’re all folded up in thirds and in this old onion-skin paper, and they’re very fragile,” Ekstrom said. The fund could be used to contract services to help complete the project, though she emphasized the office’s protectiveness of the documents and that whoever takes care of them would need to handle the job with care.
Other than the 20,000 Torrens, the remainder of historical real estate records have been scanned, but not yet all properly sorted into a database for easy searching. This, she thinks, would be an easier job to hand off to hired individuals or a specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service.
Her last suggestion for the fund was allowing images of recorded plats to be viewable from the County website. “It’s public property, and they should be able to do that,” she stated, adding the Recorder’s Office gets a lot of inquiries for the service.
The second fund on Ekstrom’s mind was the County Property Records Compliance fund, whose reserve balance is currently at a whopping $403,561. This fund is used in a more varied manner for special projects rather than daily operating expenses. Some examples of what it has been used in the past include contracting a County Surveyor (for the Minnesota Public Land Survey System (PLSS) Remonumentation Project), paying for aerial photography updates, and giving an annual $5,000 budget to the County Auditor for imaging historic tax documents, their own office’s share of doing digital backups.
Unlike the first fund, Ekstrom’s proposal for future use of the County Property Records Compliance Fund was one single item: a contract for the services of a designated County Surveyor. This surveyor, she explained, would serve as a single point of contact and knowledge reserve for all County staff concerning survey-related problems. “A surveyor would be a great asset to assist the Recorder’s office, Auditor’s office, assessor’s GIS, Planning and Zoning, Highway Department, and Forestry,” Ekstrom stated. “It would be more efficient for all the departments to have one go-to, a designated contact that represents the whole county and knows their policies rather than having each office need to reach out to an individual surveyor for questions that come up”.
She clarified that this new County Surveyor would not be a replacement for surveyors hired by private property owners. The position would be for the benefit of County staff, to give them a good and reliable source for reviews, surveys, and related work. The surveyor would also help collaborate between departments to develop plans far more efficiently and effectively than each department working separately.
Ekstrom followed up her recommendations with more statistics for the County Recorder’s Office. Aside from real estate documents, last year they handled processing for 338 birth certificates, 1,095 death certificates, 54 marriage licenses, 177 marriage certificates, 27 notary commissions, and 29 marriage officiants. Each of these records processed involves payment, which is part of how the Recorder’s Office makes its revenue. For comparison, in 2024 they handled 263 birth certificates (making 2,234), 1,328 death certificates (4,126), 62 marriage licenses (1,550), 111 marriage certificates (999), 28 notary commissions (560), and 32 marriage officiants (800).
As a cap to her presentation, Ekstrom had three different perspectives to share on the local office’s history. The first was the number of documents filed at four key points. 1887 was the furthest back Ekstrom could find, with a shockingly large amount of 775 Abstract documents filed, which she guessed was because “that’s when Two Harbors was starting to get developed, and people were buying lots and blocks.” At the time, she added, recorder’s fees averaged a dollar a document. In 1910, the Torrens system of land registration and transfer began, and 1,660 Abstract documents were filed, along with 31 brand new Torrens documents. In 1995, Ekstrom first joined the Lake County Recorder’s Office. At the time, the recording fee was $19.50, and there were 2,116 Abstract documents and 746 Torrens documents filed. Finally, 2026 has so far had 1,691 Abstract documents and 607 Torrens documents filed, and the recording fee has jumped over the past few decades to $46 per document.
Second, she offered a broad review of how records processing has evolved over the years. Documents were being copied by hand with pen and ink starting in 1856 until 1903, when they switched to typewriters. Along the way, in 1888, they began using pre-designed forms with blank spaces to be filled out. Leaping ahead, 1972 introduced photocopiers, then in 1996 computers began being used for data entry. Scanners were used to digitize images in 2004, and in 2013 the office made another stride in switching to digital services with electronic recording and computer-generated Certificates of Title. Ekstrom was positive about the changes she’d seen during her time in the office, praising the ease of use given by being able to do things digitally.
Third and last was a history far more personal to Ekstrom, showcasing her milestones and other highlights from her career at the Recorder’s Office. In 2000, five years after starting, she overhauled how Plats and Surveys were recorded, making it easier to update and do cross-references, whereas “before they used to type every plat name, book page”. In 2007, at her request, the Auditor’s office established the practice of adding parcel codes to documents, which she explained was “very beneficial moving forward with tracking down records now, because a lot of people are just parcel code dependent.” In 2013, the office began creating electronic Certificates of Title and “it’s been a great time saver.” The office began assigning document numbers to Notary Commissions in 2015 and Ordinations in 2020, allowing for easier searches. Also around that time in 2016, she was contracted to image all of the County’s historical real estate records, a task that has taken a decade, but she is happy to have done so, as it preserves records in case of natural disaster, “because those records can’t be replaced.” 2022 added a new and far less messy Plat Filing Cabinet system, and 2024 added two updates of a GIS link on parcel information to related real estate documents and Certificates of Possessory Title Registration to property owners to help fast track Torrens processing. Her final note was for the Document Alert Fraud Service, added recently to help property owners.
Board Chair Rich Sve and County Administrator Matthew Huddleston thanked Ekstrom in turn for the presentation, with Sve complimenting the history lessons and commenting on the change in the office over the years: less paper copies but still a lot of use for residents and staff alike. “Come a long way,” Ekstrom added at last.
