Town Clerks

ELECTIONS

Presidential Ballots

A new law authorizes municipal clerks to designate a location in a municipal facility for distributing, completing, and processing presidential ballot applications and distributing, casting, and returning presidential ballots on Election Day. The clerks may appoint one or more presidential ballot assistants to serve at the location and delegate to these assistants, whom they must train and supervise, any of the responsibilities the presidential ballot statutes assign to municipal clerks (PA 04-80, July 1, 2004).

Polling Place

In towns with part-time registrars, the act requires registrars, rather than town clerks, to file voter information, just as full-time registrars do, in the registrars’ office.

The act also eliminates a requirement that a municipality’s legislative body approve an alternative polling place designated by the municipality’s registrars. It makes the designation effective until the registrars file a document with the town clerk stating that the it is no longer necessary. By law, registrars may designate a polling place outside but adjacent to a voting district if they determine that no convenient or suitable polling place exists in the district. The place could be a separate room in an existing polling place (PA 04-113, July 1, 2004).

GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATION

School Budget Referendum

The law allows any town, by vote of its legislative body, to authorize the printing and preparation of concise explanatory texts of local proposals or questions approved for submission to the town’s electors at a referendum. This new law allows the board of selectmen in a town whose legislative body is a town meeting to decide by majority vote whether to authorize dissemination of such text or other neutral printed material. For a regional school district referendum, the act requires (1) the regional board of education to authorize the preparation and printing of concise explanatory texts; (2) the regional board’s secretary to prepare the texts, subject to approval by the board’s counsel; and (3) the secretary to undertake all of the responsibilities for the questions, proposals, and texts that the law already specifies for town clerks in towns conducting referenda (PA 04-117, May 21, 2004).

OFFICE OF THE TOWN CLERK

Veterans’ Property Tax Exemptions

This act allows active duty service members and veterans or members of their immediate families to keep receiving certain veterans’ property tax exemptions when they move to a different town during the assessment year. It does this by requiring tax assessors to give each person receiving one of these exemptions a certificate attesting to his eligibility for the exemption for that assessment year. A person moving to another town can establish his claim for the exemption in that town by giving its assessor a copy of the certificate.

Existing law, which this act does not change, provides a procedure by which a veteran who moves to another town may establish his claim for the veteran’s exemption in that town. The veteran can ask the clerk of his former town to send his honorable discharge certificate or a certified copy of it to the clerk of his new town. Or, he may establish his claim in the new town by showing the clerk the certificate or a copy of it (PA 04-40).

Service of Process

By law, service of process in most civil actions against a town, city, borough, board, commission, department, or agency is made by serving two copies on the town, city, or borough clerk. The clerk keeps one copy and forwards the other to the affected board, commission, department, or agency.

Beginning October 1, 2004, this act specifies that service of process must be made in this manner for appeals to the Superior Court from decisions of a (1) municipal zoning commission, planning commission, combined planning and zoning commission, zoning board of appeals, inland wetlands agency, or other land use board or commission or (2) municipal chief elected official or his designee for certain littering or dumping violations. Under prior law, service in these actions was made by leaving a copy with the municipal clerk and with or at the place of abode of the board chairman or clerk.

By law, service provides legal notice of the appeal and does not make the municipal clerk or board chairman or clerk a necessary party to the appeal (PA 04-78).

RECORD ADMINISTRATION

Real Estate Conveyances to Nonprofits

This act requires any deed or other instrument that conveys an interest in real estate to a nonprofit landholding organization after September 30, 2004 to be signed by a duly authorized officer of the organization to indicate the organization’s acceptance. The act specifies that a conveyance includes a conservation restriction or easement. A nonprofit landholding organization is a nonprofit corporation incorporated under Connecticut law, having as one of its principal purposes the conservation and preservation of land. It includes a land trust.

The act makes a violation an unfair or deceptive trade practice, punishable by a civil penalty of $ 500 (PA 04-114).

Land Record Recordings

The act authorizes town clerks to record a copy of a deed or other instrument affecting real estate located in their town that is recorded in the land records of another town. They may do so only if the other town clerk certifies that the copy is a true copy of the deed or instrument recorded in that town. When the copy is recorded, it has the same legal effect as if the original had been recorded (PA 04-132).

Air Pollution Orders on Land Records

The act requires the recipient of certified copies of final orders to correct air pollution violations to file them on the land record of the town where the violation occurred. It also requires the recipient, rather than the Department of Environmental Protection commissioner, to file on the land records notice that the order has been fully complied with or revoked. The commissioner must file the certified copy or notice only if the recipient does not own the property where the violation occurred. The act requires the person filing the notice, final order, or certificate to submit a certified copy of it to the commissioner, indicating the volume and page number of the land records where it was filed. The act exempts from these filing requirements an order to create or use emission reduction credits (PA 04-151, May 24, 2004).

Vital Records

This act gives local registrars of vital statistics the authority the Department of Public Health commissioner already has to match birth and death certificates and to post the facts of death to the appropriate birth certificate in order to protect the integrity of vital records and prevent their fraudulent use.

The act also: