Are you electronically filing your right-of-way paperwork?

Managing a right-of-way (ROW) project that spans multiple states and estimating the associated cost and schedule has long been a complex problem. Typically, an enormous amount of effort goes into collecting and researching information, negotiating, and ultimately ensuring compliance with the laws to record the transaction. Standardizing and maintaining common practices throughout the organization, especially those that operate in multiple states and support various internal processes, pose other challenges. More amazing is integrating a ROW management system with the company’s financial assets, images and accounts payable management systems. As ROW-informed staff retire or relocate, more and more companies are realizing the high cost of retaining the knowledge base and transitioning to the new workforce, especially in light of internal and external processes. constantly changing. This is a rapidly growing concern given the imminent retirement of baby boomers from the workforce.

Today, with many e-Government and e-filing initiatives, some of these pains will disappear. This article discusses a fairly standard way to obtain rights-of-way and the significant savings that come with electronic document management, workflow automation, and electronic collaboration with government agencies. Using an electric power company as an example, this article shows how an end-to-end ROW acquisition process can be managed.

A lifestyle

Traditionally, the first activity with a ROW project is to develop a budget and schedule estimate. This estimate has multiple components and its precision varies depending on the level of experience of ROW personnel and the quality of information available to them. Cost of ownership, labor, documentation, and legal fees are certainly key factors on project managers’ minds. Large projects are more vulnerable to budget overruns due to the size and complexity involved. On large projects, a project manager leads a team of agents who coordinate various activities, such as surveying, negotiating with property owners, and perhaps the painful eminent domain or eminent domain process. This team of agents is responsible for completing easement documents that comply with local and state laws. To add to the complexity, each state and local government has specific dictated forms based on the particular type of property owner (corporation, person), notary clauses, etc. In addition, the team must select from several alternative routes and easements and then file documents with status and multiple recipients and distribute reports.

A plethora of paperwork

These legal recordable documents are complex and vary greatly by state and type of owner. Added to this is another set of internal forms and various letters sent to owners and other interface bodies. This process requires a great deal of effort and experience for an agent to understand and complete the required paperwork within the utility, not to mention all the permutations of state and local government forms.

Despite expensive training or recruitment of specialized skill sets, document generation is error-prone and time-consuming. If the document is submitted incorrectly, late, or not appropriate, the cost and potential liability for these errors are significant. Although the agent negotiates with the property owner to define the proper legal documents, the project manager must deal with the resulting liabilities. At the very least, wasted time slows down an already cumbersome process and delays project completion. Missing approvals and other document errors can be catastrophic for the project.

For the utility industry, there are no uniform document standards across many state, county, and local governments, resulting in hundreds of potential legally recordable documents, letters, and forms. Complex legal disputes, especially around eminent domain processes, can take a long time, sometimes years. Incorrect or late submissions may result in penalties and further delays. As Project Managers can coordinate multiple projects at the same time, each with multiple agents in different geographic areas under various state and local requirements, it is clear that Right of Way workflow is a problem that cries out for simplification.