Managing a right-of-way (ROW) project spanning multiple states and estimating the associated cost and schedule has long been a complex issue. Typically, a great deal of effort goes into gathering and researching information, negotiating, and ultimately ensuring compliance with the laws to record the transaction. Standardizing and maintaining common practices across the organization, especially those that operate in multiple states and support various internal processes, pose other challenges. More mind-blowing is the integration of a ROW management system with the company’s asset, image, and financial accounts payable management systems. As ROW’s experienced staff retire or move, 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 processes and constantly changing externalities. This is a rapidly growing concern given the impending retirement of the baby boomers’ workforce.
Today, with many e-government and e-filing initiatives, some of these pains will go away. This article looks at 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 a copyright acquisition process can be managed end-to-end.
A lifestyle
Traditionally, the first activity with a ROW project is to develop a budget and estimated schedule. This estimate has multiple components and its accuracy varies depending on the experience level of ROW staff and the quality information available to them. The cost of ownership, labor, documentation, and legal fees are certainly key factors on the minds of project managers. 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 owners, and perhaps the painful process of expropriation or appropriation. This team of agents is responsible for completing easement documents that comply with state and local laws. To increase complexity, each state and local government has specific dictated formats based on the particular type of owner (corporation, person), notarial clauses, etc. In addition, the team must select from several alternative routes and easements and then present the documents to the state and multiple recipients, and distribute the reports.
A plethora of paperwork
These legal recordable documents are complex and vary widely by state and type of owner. Added to this is another set of internal forms and several letters sent to owners and other interface bodies. This process requires an immense amount 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 formats.
Despite expensive training or hiring specialized skill sets, document generation is error prone and time consuming. If the document is submitted incorrectly, late or unenforceable, 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 responsibilities. At the very least, wasted time slows down an already cumbersome process and delays project completion. Lack of approvals and other document errors can be catastrophic for the project.
For the utility industry, there are no uniform document standards across multiple state, county, and local governments, resulting in hundreds of potential legally registrable documents, letters, and forms. Complex legal disputes, especially around expropriation processes, can take a long time, sometimes years. Incorrect or late filings can result in fines 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 streamlined issue.