By Matt Schury
Kendall County Clerk Debbie Gillette defended her office after a County Board meeting Tuesday night during which Jerry Bannister, a candidate for county recorder, accused her of putting county residents’ personal information at risk.
Bannister, of Oswego, presented a box to the board filled with documents that he said contained Social Security number of county residents.
“I have over 2,000 documents here … every one of these pages shows a Social Security number that was published on the Internet and I can guarantee you I have some in here that were not redacted as the clerk said in public statements at the County Bboard, “Bannister said.
Bannister told the board during the citizen’s comment portion of the board meeting that he intends to notify each of the people who he says have had their personal information violated when it was posted to the internet.
“I don’t know how I’m going to do it and I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it because at 44 cents a piece it’s going to cost me about a thousand bucks in postage just to do it,” he said.
Bannister has criticized Gillette- suggesting that she put county residents’ personal information at risk when mortgage documents and other legal documents were made available online.
Gillette responded after the meeting that Bannister’s accusations against her office are politically motivated and said she never put county residents’ personal information at risk.
Gillette noted that the documents Bannister was talking about had been taken down from the county website in January. She added that nothing was done wrong when the documents were posted to the county’s website in 2008 and in fact her office began redacting the sensitive information from the documents shortly after it was posted.
Gillette added that her office continues to remove personal information from those documents and once they are completed will post them back to the county’s website. Her office has already reviewed about 115,000 out of a total of 300,000 documents and found less than seven percent of those documents had a Social Security number on them, Gillette said.
Gillette says that documents include things like mortgage titles, that are public information and available to anyone in hard copy at her office.
When asked why the documents were posted online before the sensitive was redacted, Gillette said it is common to have the records online in many counties and, at the time, there was no law requiring redaction of personal information like Social Security numbers.
“It’s not uncommon, when the new vendor came in and I was newly elected there was an option to put it on the Internet,” Gillette said. “We had requests from citizens to be able to check their records to see if mortgages or leases had been recorded so it’s easier for them to go online to see it and do it.”
After she put those documents online, the state statute changed, requiring redaction of sensitive information in 2009.
“Then they stated that we need to have a policy, if there were any Social Security numbers how we were going to take care of them and they gave us five years,” Gillette said. “It didn’t mean we were going to take that long, we were obviously going to do it as quickly as possible.”
“And we are still doing it but that is public information. Any information that is in those books and not on our computer system, we cannot change those, these are legal documents. We cannot open up a book and highlight, cross out Social Security numbers. The only ones that we have the ability to block out are the ones on our computer systems.”
“This was not pushed to the side, I don’t know where that information came from staff was concerned about these numbers being out there,” she said.
“These are public records,” Gillette said. “You can go to one of the public computers and look up any information that you want. This is helping remove those numbers.”
During the County Board meeting, Chairman John Purcell asked Gillette about the state of her office on the recording side.
Gillette noted that the number of recordings her office does is down by 49 percent from 2003.
“I would say, yeah it has to do with the economy, Kendall County was growing so fast—people were selling homes, people were buying homes and as we know that’s really tapered down,” she said.
Additionally she said that articles of incorporation are now recorded at the state level.
As far as staffing needs, Gillette said when she first became clerk in 2008 she had six full-time employees and now her office has four full-time positions with one person away on medical leave. She also mentioned that they are able to record documents in two days.