County Clerk ushering in future, preserving past
Liberty County Clerk Lee Haidusek Chambers discusses some of the archival restoration efforts made by her office after the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce Luncheon. The Vindicator | Ariel Turner
For most people, the Liberty County Courthouse is not a place frequently visited, and in most cases, the only two offices that will ever affect someone are the tax office and the county clerk.
Since taking office in 2015, County Clerk Lee Haidusek Chambers and her staff has worked diligently to streamline many processes in that office to extend better access to the community.
“We are doing it in every single area,” Chambers said, “the idea is to make it more convenient for people to get their records.”
The improvements to the way the clerk’s office conducts business are paramount as preparations continue to prepare for the growth and development coming to the area.
During Chambers time in office, the collection fees have doubled in just three years; with that number, the ability to process the intake of payments grows even more critical.
One central area of improvement is the online access to public records, such as deeds, death records, etc. The county has records from Jan. 1, 1875, through Feb. 2022, adding new records daily.
Most everything can now be accessed through the clerk’s website, while items like birth certificates are available for purchase online only.
Those purchases are more accessible than ever before, with expanded credit card options available to the public.
“We are hoping to have more available and more online functionality,” Chambers said.
Other areas of business the public can now handle online include filing for an Assumed Name/DBA application, commissioner’s court meeting minutes, cattle brands, and marriage applications, among other areas.
The clerk’s website also offers a program called Fraud Guard, a free program that helps prevent property fraud. It is designed to alert any local property owner in the event a document is recorded with their information.
As the overseer of the misdemeanor court records, the clerk’s office has participated in upgrading the county’s court system to Odyssey. The program is accessible countywide and can be accessed by the sheriff’s department, county and district clerks, as well as the county and district attorney’s offices. “We’re still in the process of building it. It’s going to be a really nice system once we get it done,” Chambers said.
Under Chambers, the clerk’s office has worked to create a full-time elections office with an administrator and voters registrar and updated the elections equipment and system here in the county.
Currently, her office is working on upgrades to the audio and video systems in the courtrooms to enable the county to do more. This issue first came about due to COVID19 with judges seeing inmates in the Liberty County Jail without bringing them physically to the courthouse.
Finally, Chambers has embarked on preserving the county’s historical records. That restoration project is focused on Liberty County’s documents dating back before the 1950s.
That process is quite the undertaking as the county’s older paper archives must be treated for acid and sealed in protected sleeves before being rebound.
For more information on the county clerk’s office and to see some of the improvements available to the public, visit co.liberty.tx.us, or visit them in person and grab a great free pen while you are there.