Podcast - The Miami-Dade County Clerk of the Court's Vision for Real Estate Business

Miriam Ramos: Hi, we are here broadcasting from Holland & Knight's Miami office. Holland & Knight is an international law firm with 32 offices around the world, practicing in pretty much every area of law with few exception. I have the pleasure of being joined by my partner, Andres Fernandez, and by our clerk, Juan Fernandez-Barquin, and his general counsel, Luis Montaldo. And so with that, I'm going to turn this over to Andy to start the conversation. 

Andres Fernandez: Thank you so much, Miriam. Great to be here. Thank you both for joining us. As Miriam mentioned, my name is Andy Fernandez. I've had the pleasure of working with the clerk and his team for many years now. And we've had the opportunity to navigate some challenges and some turbulent times. Clerk, I want to start with you. You know, can you explain kind of how the office and the roles have changed in light of Amendment 10 and this significant change that has impacted specifically you and other constitutionals?

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: Absolutely. Thank you, Andres. And thank you, Miriam. It's fantastic to be here. So my name is Juan Fernandez-Barquin. I'm the clerk of the court and comptroller. So in 2018, the voters approved Amendment 10, and Amendment 10 basically required every county to elect their own sheriff, tax collector, property appraiser, supervisor of elections and the clerk of the court and comptroller. The clerk of the court and comptroller was already previously elected. That is not a new position. It's been in the constitution, believe it or not, since Florida was a territory before it became a state. It was actually one of the first things that the territorial governor did, was assign a clerk specifically for real estate purposes for assuring that the deeds would be transferred over from Spain to the territory of Florida, and in order to keep track what the ownership was for the different parcels of land. But I digress.

So in 2018, the voters approved it. It required that. And it was very interesting because the amendment, if you actually looked at the fine print, it said that in 2022, all counties with the exception of Miami-Dade and Broward were obligated to do this. The fine print further states that effective January 7, 2025, is when Miami-Dade and Broward are supposed to do it. In Miami-Dade's case, the clerk of the court did not have the finance department underneath them, the county finance department, which is a comptrolling section, right? They didn't have a tax collector, the supervisor of elections technically reported to the mayor and the sheriff was technically the mayor, the county mayor. As a result of Amendment 10, all three of those offices branched off, and the finance department was obligated to transfer over to the clerk of the court and comptroller's office. That's basically what happened, and that was Miami-Dade. The reason Broward was wrapped up into it, just in case anyone's wondering, is because a tax collector, I believe the tax collector's office did not exist at all, or if it did, maybe it was under the property appraiser's office for some reason. But anyway, so they created a tax collector's office for Broward County.

But that's essentially what happened, but also the clear picture, the whole picture, is that along with the finance department being the comptroller, there's four principal duties. One, to be the auditor of the county. So any county funds, where they go, the comptroller has the ability to audit where the funds are going to make sure that they're being used with the intention that the county commissioners approved. [Two], county investor, [and three], accountant for the Board of County Commissioners. And also custodian of funds for the county, which kind of wraps up into accountant for the Board of County Commissioners. So yeah, that, that's how the rules change, is that basically those four more rules were added to clerk of the court and comptroller.

Andres Fernandez: I think you're being awfully humble because a lot of people think of the clerk and they think of parking tickets and jury duty. And I think your role and your office's role goes way beyond that. I think even before Amendment 10, but I think if we could share a little bit of, you know, like you said, your day is just consumed with so many things that go way beyond parking tickets and jury duty.

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: So my general counsel's here, Luis Mataldo, I think he'd agree with me that there's basically two spheres in the office. There's the county sphere and then there's a court sphere. The court side is much bigger. I would say roughly about 60 percent to 70 percent of the employees are on the court side. That is, as you mentioned, processing traffic tickets. Technically, parking tickets are more on the county side, but I lump it in all together to make it easier for everyone. But traffic tickets, jury duty, custodian of files for the records, right? So a judge sets a hearing, right? If you're an attorney, you reach out to the judicial assistant to set a hearing. They communicate with us and say, hey, listen, we want to make sure that the physical file is available, and we make sure that the physical file is available. I personally think that the history behind that, and correct me if I'm wrong, Luis, is it was a check and balance against the judiciary to make sure that they don't doctor any documents, quite frankly. So that's on the court side.

On the county side, it is many, many, many different functions. We administer the Value Adjustment Board. So if you appeal your property taxes, you have to file that appeal with us. We coordinate with the PA's office, with the property appraiser’s office, for the delegate from the Value Adjustment Board to make a [determination] on the reassessment of the property if the reassessment is being challenged, right? We're the clerk of the Board of County Commissioners, so if you go to a county commission meeting, you'll see about four representatives from our office there taking notes, noting who sponsored what legislation, how the county commissioner has voted, who said what and so on. You know, essentially the minutes of the meeting. We issue marriage licenses. They are the happiest section. And then in addition to that, we also technically do code enforcement hearings. We coordinate the code enforcement hearings on behalf of the county. That's not a [statutory obligation], but it's something that we do more out of habit than anything else.

Luis Montaldo: Because of our kind of quasi-judicial role in keeping records and so forth. That's why the county had asked.

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: Yeah, it basically just carried over and we still have it. And then lastly, the official records of the county. Custodian of the records of the county. Deeds, mortgages, judgments. And that's where we really interact the most with the real estate, is that. If the developer is trying to create a plat and a new subdivision and they go in front of whatever municipality or the county to get it approved, they have to record it with us. Which is actually an issue that we recently had with City of Doral, that a developer was trying to record a plat with us, but apparently the PDF was too large to submit over SimpliFile. So I just said hey, easiest thing is just print them out, just come to the office and we'll process them in person. It's not a big deal. You know, we'll set aside an hour to just concentrate solely on this. So the official records, we're going to be undergoing a lot of changes on the official records, and that is something that's a big project of mine. We're working together with this fantastic vendor called Medici Land Governance. They indexed all the deeds for all the derelict properties in Baltimore, for a whole section of Baltimore, right? Unfortunately, it's very sad. If you ever go to Baltimore, at least when I lived in D.C. 15 years ago, I would take the train into Baltimore on the way to New York. And as you come in on the train, I mean, there's a lot of abandoned properties there. So, the city tasked an RFP to index all these deeds, covenants and mortgages and any liens and just do this extensive research on what's affecting each one of these properties, and it's an incredible interface. I mean, it's incredibly easy to navigate. It's something that we are trying to use as a model for what we want to do together with them. We're confident that we're going to be able to create a new interface for the official records.

Andres Fernandez: I have one more question. I think you both have mentioned it on the custodian of funds and that aspect of your responsibility, and I think it's important for our listeners to understand that it goes well beyond your clerk. And now in light of Amendment 10, where you're the custodian of funds, not only for your traditional clerk duties, but also for the county. And we're talking about significant amounts of money that are now falling under your purview. If you can kind of talk a little bit about that.

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: The budget, the last budget that was passed, I think, was roughly about $13 billion, and I mean, if you were to make Miami-Dade County a country in and of itself, you're talking about, I want to say it's in the top 25 of countries, if it were its own country. It's larger, the GDP, the production, the budget of the county itself is larger than some Central American countries. I mean, it's a fact. And it's something that, it's incredible. It's something that I'm incredibly excited about, being the custodian of funds also, because that is something that my long-term plan with that is to create an interface for residents. Taxpayers can go online and see how the county is spending their money. They can see if a county commissioner bought coffee for his office. They can see how the parks department, how much money they're spending on sod. I believe in radical transparency. And this is something that I want. I want that to be available to the general public because I think we owe it to them. And also with the implementation of AI. I mean, that would be the next step beyond that, like creating the dashboard and then being able to add a layer of AI on top of it. I mean that's a future.

Miriam Ramos: So a lot of our audience is people in the real estate business, right? Our clients that are either on the transactional side or on the land use side, or both. You talked about this kind of redoing of the office that does the recording of deeds, covenants, etc. What's that going to mean for the end user? Like tomorrow I'm a real estate developer and I'm interacting with your office. How does that work for me?

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: I want it to be as easy as possible for them to interact with the office. Some people talk about blockchain. I think blockchain is only as good as the data you put into it. If you have a fraudster on the front end with blockchain, it's going to be fraud in the blockchain. So people talk about blockchain, I think it's great, it has a purpose. We're not there yet. At least my office is not there yet. AI, artificial intelligence, is really where the elephant in the room is. What I have envisioned when it comes to the official records is basically that, one, we can create a reliable, unofficial title search for properties, for parcels, through the use of AI, and they did this with Medici Land Governance. They were basically able to fill in the gaps because they basically extracted the text from deeds, from covenants, from all these instruments, and using AI, they were able to cross-reference all of them. And where you previously maybe had a gap in the chain of title, now all of a sudden AI said, oh, we found the document, it's this, right? And they submit it in there. So basically doing that. I also think that there's no reason why we can't. We essentially already accept documents on the front end when individuals come to the counter and they record documents.

So another feature that we want to do is online, a portal, drag and drop, basically, a mortgage that you want to record. Drag and drop a deed, drag and drop a notice of a commencement, right? These are all things that I don't understand why you have to go through a third party who's going to charge you an exorbitant fee, I think like, typically, like $35, $40. This is something that the technology is there, we just got to implement it and streamline it. Along with the AI, something else that a developer would find incredibly helpful is that – I'm sure that there's a way to do this – to cross-reference and extract data from the property appraiser's website. We already essentially do it. I mean, because they have a link to our documents, right? So cross-referencing the data and scraping the data for those parcels on their end in order to cross reference. We're working already on cross-referencing the addresses, actually, on the official records. But for AI, if you want to know within a certain area of town, what was the most expensive house that went for sale between this date and this date, within X amount of feet of a school.

Miriam Ramos: That kind of search function, like a GIS type.

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: Incredibly detailed search function is what we're striving for. I mean, this is years before we get there.

Miriam Ramos: So what's the rollout for that?

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: It's years before we got there, but at the moment we're in discussions with Medici Land Governance to create something together, and the idea is that after we create it, for them to be able to duplicate it and sell it to other clerk's offices, but to create like a one-stop shop when it comes to this kind of stuff.

Luis Montaldo: And if I can say one thing just on behalf of the clerk, basically his commitment to modernization of our records as we know now, I mean, everything has gone digital. People expect to be able to receive information digitally. And both the courts and our government have been behind, we'll say, in that process. It's always a lagging process. And you've really made a commitment as far as the office, like you said, radical transparency, on putting as much data online so that our public has access to it. And I think that's just a huge change, being with the offices I have for a long time. That's a huge change that you've undertaken that's of paramount importance.

Andres Fernandez: No again, kudos to that. And you know, you haven't been around that long, so you know, you've been doing a lot in a short amount of time, and I'm curious, for our listeners, have you had a chance to kind of collaborate with other clerks around the state and is there something that you maybe see another county is doing that you may want to kind of do? Or vice versa?

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: So there's 67 counties in the state. There's a group of clerks that I communicate with frequently. I used to speak to the clerk of Palm Beach County frequently, but he got appointed to county administrator, Joe Abruzzo. And the new clerk, I know him, he's a friend of mine. But I do communicate with actually the Lee County clerk a lot. I communicate with the Orange County clerk a fair amount also. Because even though she's only the clerk of the court, she's not the comptroller, but from a clerk of the court perspective, she has really streamlined a lot of the operations over there. So Lee County was the location for a pilot program in order to try and combat deed fraud, with requiring individuals to show proof of identification when they were submitting deeds, any sort of deed, quick-claim deed, warranty deed. Showing it in person also, but not just a person who was filing it, the grantor and the grantee. And also online and also through the mail. So I think that's a great idea, but we don't have the technology. It's not there yet. So that's one thing that I've spoken with him a lot to try and see what we can do to change the law to change it from a pilot program to something permanent. But how exactly without being too cumbersome to the other actors in real estate because it takes time to implement, it takes time for people to be aware of it. But that's one thing, for instance. The other thing is just from a marketing perspective looking at what they do and branding to see how to communicate to the public what exactly we do because, as you said, you think parking tickets and traffic tickets, right, and we do a lot more than that. Jury duty is a whole beast in itself, I mean, because we have hundreds of people every week coming in and out and we have two different locations, which is unlike most other clerk's offices. Everyone else has just one courthouse. So it's a lot of things that I just try and pick and choose and see what they're doing, but the branding is a big one.

Miriam Ramos: So change always comes with challenges, right? And you're instituting a tremendous amount of change, and like Andy said, in a very short period of time, and significant, as Luis mentioned. Can you tell us your top three kind of challenges in the next couple of years as you see it?

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: I'm sure Luis will agree with me, that we have certain technological limitations. I want the public to understand that it's not because of us, OK? Just to give you an idea, when it comes to criminal court files, we are at the mercy of the county for them to purchase the technology. We've had the same system. It's called the Criminal Justice Information System. We've had the same system for over 30 years. Over 30 years, it hasn't changed much. So it is like MS-DOS. It's just something that it's been a headache for the county. They finally did an RFP, they have a winner, they're going back and forth with these people and it's going to take years before the new one comes up.

Luis Montaldo: Miami-Dade County has a multi-agency system that's written into the chart in the constitution. So basically, you have many different justice partners. You have the sheriff. You have corrections. You have state attorneys, public defenders. All the justice partners are involved in one system.

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: All the police departments in Miami-Dade County, I mean, and there's like at least 20 of them off the top of my head.

Luis Montaldo: And based on the size, these changes have been very difficult to enact, but going back to the commitment to online records, to putting information online, the clerk launched an initiative called COIN, which was an acronym just to put any information that we could start scanning on our own online before this RFP and this project came into place. To help attorneys, defense attorneys, get access to information as quick as possible. So I think it just speaks to you taking in the office and your team taking creative methods to try to get this information online even facing the budget constraints that we face, even facing these other things. It's just that commitment to getting the information where it needs to be in the public hands.

Juan Fernandez-Barquin: Just in trying to figure out a way to do it and then, for instance, with the official records, that is something that we kind of like stumbled into it because the technological provider, the company that provided us a system, is not doing an update. They just said hey, this is the last update. And I told Luis I'm like OK, well this is a perfect opportunity now for us to try and do something special. Right? We also have a ton of limitations when it comes to funding. So I also threw at Medici Land Governance, that we're going back and forth on, that part of the deal, and we haven't penned the deal yet, but part of deal is that we develop the system, they sell it, and we collect a small amount of revenue, a small licensing fee, right? And we become partners. But we helped them in developing it. So just thinking outside of the box, because technologically, we have been just constrained.

This is an interesting issue when it comes to technology, what was it, three years ago? The change in the statute for the technological funds? We were basically handcuffed when it came to how many funds we could divert to technology, and that's not just technology, but that also included labor, right? Like our IT team. So that statute changed, that's given us some breathing room, and we're just revisiting everything that we have and trying to look at it from a different perspective and seeing how to make things better.

Payment plans is another thing. We now have payment plans for traffic tickets and for criminal court costs. So this is something that, yeah, it existed before, but you would have to come to the office. You'd have to sit down with a clerk. You have to pay for parking. You probably have to find childcare. All these inconveniences, right? But now you can do it online from the comforts of your own home. You can apply to be indigent if you want to go below the threshold. But we have plans as low as $10.00 a month. We have so many different technological systems that we depend on. I mean in total about, just off the top of my head, I think seven? It's all these different things. As things lose their functionality, we're revisiting it to see how we can make it better.

Andres Fernandez: On behalf of Miriam and myself and Holland & Knight, thank you, Clerk. Thank you, Luis, for your time. You were very gracious with us. And thank you for your service.