What's in a name? No signature, no land subdivision

SUFFOLK

Just about every day, people like Randon Setzer head to the local courthouse to thumb through someone else's land records.

Setzer does it for a living. He's a title examiner, which means he checks the chain of ownership on a piece of property to make sure everything's in order for a new buyer.

Every so often he spots an error: missing signatures, misspelled names, transposed numbers.

"You cannot rule out the human factor," Setzer said. "You're going to make mistakes."

As buried away and forgotten as they often are, such mistakes may have just become more costly for Suffolk's property owners.

Recently, a Suffolk judge ruled against Kevin and Anne-Marie Brooks' bid to reverse a City Council vote that wiped away the subdivision of their land, an action the couple said has cost them several hundred thousand dollars.

In winning the case, a city attorney argued that a missing signature invalidated part of the couple's plans, even though the Brookses knew about the oversight and thought they had addressed it.

Severn Kellam, a title insurance agent who testified as an expert witness for the couple, said hundreds of people with otherwise-innocuous errors on their land records would be open to a challenge if the city were to apply the same standard across the board.

"The implications are huge," Kellam said. "Basically there's a vehicle to go out and target people that's doing something that you don't like."

Mistakes like a missing signature don't happen every day, but they happen often enough, especially if one were to go back far enough in a property's history, Kellam said.

"Do I go and make a list of those and carry them all into City Council and say, 'These all have to be voided, too'?"

City Attorney Ed Roettger said he couldn't comment on the case. He declined to respond to Kellam's concerns.

Councilman Jeff Gardy, an attorney who specializes in land-use issues, dismissed the notion that the ruling by Circuit Court Judge Carl E. Eason Jr. imperils anyone with a minor error in their property records.

Challenges to a plat or subdivision still have to go before the City Council, Gardy said, and he didn't foresee council members starting a practice of vacating property lines because of technicalities.

Title examiners find mistakes "all the time," said Terri Stitzer, an examiner who runs her own research business in Suffolk with her husband, Dennis. The fix is often pretty simple: The errors are corrected and the record is filed again, she said.

Last week Stitzer took a break from her research in the records room of the Suffolk courthouse to read a copy of the city's argument over the missing signature in the Brooks case.

"This could open up a Pandora's box," she said.

"Wow."

Kevin Brooks said his wife didn't sign their plat in the fall of 2006 because then-Planning Director Scott Mills said she didn't need to. Several months later, when the couple had a title search done for a loan, an attorney determined that Anne-Marie Brooks should have signed the plat.

Kevin Brooks said the attorney told them they could solve the problem by having Anne-Marie sign a deed on the property, which she did.

Mills, now the acting deputy city manager, declined to comment.

The Brookses thought the matter was resolved. They continued with their plans of subdividing a portion of the 106 acres they owned on Longstreet Lane in rural southwestern Suffolk. Kevin and Anne-Marie planned to live on part of the land and hoped that someday one or more of their three children would return to live on it, too.

They also planned to sell three of the new lots from the subdivision. Kevin Brooks said he reached agreements to sell two of them and had an offer on a third.

In late May, Mills told Brooks the City Council was considering an ordinance to vacate his subdivision, which had already been approved, recorded and used to secure a home construction loan.

Several nearby farmers and landowners were upset with the planning department's decision. Attorney Joshua Pretlow argued on their behalf at a July council meeting, telling the council that others had asked the city whether they could subdivide the land before the Brookses bought it in 2006, and they were told they couldn't.

Kevin Brooks got his subdivision approved after he learned of a law that says a property bisected by a state-owned road can be split into two parcels.

In September an ordinance came before the council to vacate Brooks' subdivision. Mayor Linda Johnson and councilmen Gardy and Charles Parr voted against it, but the measure passed 4-3.

Anne-Marie Brooks' missing signature was never mentioned in the council's discussion, Kevin Brooks said. It first came up after he and his wife appealed.

The case went to trial March 28, and Eason dismissed the Brookses' complaint. Eason's decision did not rest entirely on the question of the missing signature, but it was the part of the ruling that most troubled Kellam, the title insurer and expert witness.

"I'm certainly going to be calling people in my industry that I know," Kellam said.

Kellam, whose office is in Norfolk, said the case has given him pause about insuring titles in Suffolk. If a fairly innocent mistake can be used to vacate someone's property lines, policies in Suffolk just got a lot riskier for title insurers, he said.

Kevin Brooks said he can appeal Eason's decision, but he doesn't think he can afford it.

"I'm a little bit tired of fighting, to be honest with you," he said.

Dave Forster, (757) 222-5563, dave.forster@pilotonline.com