Our purpose

The purpose of the Urban Recorders Alliance is to establish a coalition of Urban Recorders and staff to provide education and resources to aid a County Clerk in a county over 100,000 population who is operating in a very different environment from a County Clerk in a smaller rural county—even though the constitutional foundation of the office is the same.

Population changes the court structure, volume, organizational complexity, staffing, technology, elections, records management, and the degree of specialization required to perform those duties.

While the duties are fundamentally the same; the scale, complexity, specialization and statutory environment can be dramatically different.

The Texas County Clerk

A Texas County Clerk is a constitutionally established, locally elected public officer responsible for serving the county's courts and Commissioners Court, serving as the county's official recorder, and carrying out numerous statutory responsibilities involving courts, public records, vital records, property records, marriage licenses, probate, elections and other governmental functions.

The County Clerk is one of the most historically important and legally important elected county offices in Texas. The County Clerk is also an independently elected constitutional officer elected by the voters of each Texas county.

The Texas Constitution establishes the office in Article V, Section 20. It provides that each county shall elect a County Clerk for a four-year term. The Constitution specifically makes the County Clerk:

The Recorder of the County
The Clerk of the County Court
The Clerk of the Commissioners Court
An officer whose duties, compensation/perquisites, and fees are established by the Legislature.

In other words, the office has three fundamental constitutional identities:

County Recorder + County Court Clerk + Commissioners Court Clerk

Over the years, the Texas Legislature has added many additional statutory responsibilities, including elections, vital records, marriage licenses, assumed names, property records, probate-related records, and numerous other functions.

Recorder of records

The most historically important aspect of being the County Clerk -

Being the County Recorder.

As stipulated in Texas Local Government Code §191.001, the County Clerk serves as the county recorder; and must record authorized instruments, do so accurately and without delay, and keep records properly indexed and arranged, a very serious legal responsibility.

The County Clerk is effectively the official custodian of many documents that establish or affect legal rights. The exact recording authority is established by statute. The clerk's job isn't to decide whether a document is legally wise. The clerk's job is to determine whether the instrument meets the statutory requirements for recording and then properly record, index and preserve it. The clerk's role is fundamentally one of lawful recording, custody, indexing and certification.

The County Clerk is a records custodian. That means the office must ensure that records are maintained, protected, indexed, retrievable, preserved, properly certified, available when legally required, protected from unauthorized alteration or destruction.

This has become dramatically more complicated with the transition from:

paper → microfilm → imaging → electronic records → databases → cloud systems

The underlying legal responsibility, however, remains essentially the same:

preserve the integrity of the official record.

What makes the County Clerk such a unique public office is that the County Clerk sits at the intersection of:

Law + Government + Courts + Property + Family + History + Elections + Technology

The County Clerk: The Institutional Memory of the County

A Texas County Clerk’s Office is a public official with constitutional authority, statutory duties, elected accountability, custodial responsibilities, financial responsibilities, court responsibilities, records responsibilities, and, in many counties, election responsibilities.

Sheriffs protect people. Judges decide cases. Commissioners govern. Tax officials collect and administer taxes.

The County Clerk preserves the documentary evidence showing what the government and courts actually did. That is an enormous responsibility.

Texas County Clerks occupy a busy and unusual intersection of government functions. A County Clerk’s Office takes on multiple areas of responsibility:

Courts- County Court and related statutory courts;

Legislature/government - Commissioners Court;

Property - Deeds and other recorded instruments;

Families - Marriage licenses;

Life events - Birth and death records;

Business - Assumed names;

Ranching - Livestock brands;

Democracy -Elections;

History - Archives and historical records;

Finance - Court fees, recording fees and other statutory fees.

Very few local government offices have such a broad range.

Urban Recorders alliance

Urban Recorders Alliance brings together Texas County Clerks serving populations of 100,000 and greater to address the unique challenges of high-volume records management, court administration, technology, elections, public access, cybersecurity, staffing, legislation and leadership in rapidly growing counties.

There is a very different operational model for a large urban county.

As population and caseload increase, the County Clerk's office tends to become an organization with specialized divisions. The County Clerk becomes a CEO-like position.

For a county over 100,000, the elected County Clerk is simultaneously:

1. Constitutional Officer

Responsible for duties established by the Constitution and Legislature.

2. Court Administrator

Responsible for supporting multiple county-level courts and maintaining

their records.

3. Chief Records Officer

Responsible for enormous volumes of legal and governmental

information.

4. Executive Leader

Responsible for people, money, technology, risk, policy and organizational

performance.

And in counties where elections remain under the clerk:

5. Chief Election Administrator

That is an extraordinary combination of responsibilities.

Because the operational environment begins looking fundamentally different due to the increased population of the County, an Urban Texas County Clerk, whose statutory responsibilities are fundamentally the same as other Texas County Clerk's, typically operates within a significantly more complex environment of multiple courts, high-volume records, specialized divisions, large staffs, sophisticated technology, extensive public access demands, and increasingly complex governmental and regulatory requirements; and performs them within a substantially more complex organizational, judicial, technological and governmental environment.

The Urban Recorders Alliance supports the County and District Clerks of Texas Association in the education of its members.