Kelly Callahan has served as Freeborn County as county recorder for 10 years now. He is currently seeking re-election to his third full term.

Callahan and wife, Sue, live in Albert Lea and have two children, Patrick and Erin. He has one grandchild with two on the way.

Callahan was born and raised in Albert Lea, and he is a graduate of Albert Lea High School. He then attended the University of Minnesota Duluth before going on to get his law degree from Hamline University of Law in St. Paul.

He continues to work with several local community service, nonprofit and charitable organizations, including the Noon Kiwanis Club, was past president of the Freeborn County Historical Society and is current president of the Freeborn County Historical Society Foundation.

Callahan is passionate about history, which serves him well as he enjoys collecting antiques in his spare time.

A resident of Freeborn County his entire life, except for a few years during college, Callahan said this is to his advantage as he knows the area well, which comes in handy when working with property titles.

“I don’t view being the county recorder as work,” he said. “I really enjoy the variety of the office. You never know what’s coming up, every day is different, and I like that.”

Support

Callahan said in his next term he plans to remain committed to being recognized as a statewide authority and resource for county recorders all over the state.

Because of his education and knowledge in notary law and real estate, Callahan said he receives e-mails and calls every week from colleagues around the state and is happy to help.

Callahan said there are two ways to index and identify ownership of real estate in Minnesota, the most common being the Abstract system. He said he’s well versed in the other system, the Torrens title, which is often why he’s sought out for assistance.

Services

Callahan said over the past 10 years, the Recorder’s Office has taken on many new software programs, which help in their record keeping with birth and death certificates, passports, and running the lands record system. The Freeborn County Recorder’s Office also serves as a satellite office for filing uniform commercial codes for the state.

He said one tool that helps residents statewide is the Minnesota Official Marriage System, which allows anyone in Freeborn County to plug in a date and find marriage records anywhere in the state.

“Before, we had to search each county database separately,” he said.

Callahan was a proponent of a freestanding information technology department and says its allowed his office more efficient and enhanced systems.

Callahan has also been instrumental in the GIS system and the Beacon system, which gets property tax information online. He says the two systems will be linked in the future.

He also says he plans to remain aggressive with technology in the future, as that’s being a good steward to the community.

Callahan said, as a border county, he has noticed an increase in issuing passports to people from Iowa. He said this goes back to Hurricane Katrina, when the passport bureau that served Iowa became backlogged as it was located in Louisiana. Minnesota’s regional bureau, at that time, was in Seattle, so many Iowans came here because it was much quicker for them to get their passports processed. He also sees a lot of passport traffic thanks to interstate travel.

Budget

Dollarwise, Callahan said his office is self-sufficient. Although his office has seen an increase in state-mandated fees for records, his office is able to pass that back to the public through more efficient methods of obtaining information because of the technology put in place.

He also said that while he supports more city and county services streamlining for efficiency and budgetary reasons, he cautions about too much growth in this area. He said centralizing too many services on this level could be dangerous for the smaller areas, such as townships.

“The problem is its like farming, when all the small guys are taken over by one corporate farm, the implement guy goes broke because instead of selling six tractors a year, he’s only selling one,” he said.

“My office can process vital records in two days,” he continued. “It takes state offices much longer. There are certain efficiencies we can provide and they cannot.”