Patience Gone: OH County Recorder Threatens to Sue for More Space
The County Clerk–or in some places County Recorder–is usually a pretty low-key person in a low-key job. It’s that person’s job to keep track of land deeds and official paperwork for the county. MDN has previously pointed out an early indicator of where there will soon be drilling is when the County Clerk/Recorder’s office gets busy. In some cases, land agents have camped out overnight waiting to get in to a deed records office (see Title Researchers Camp Out at Tyler County (WV) Clerk’s Office). Harrison County, OH’s County Recorder is Tracy Boyer. The records office where she works has been hopping busy going on two years now. Tracy is normally a patient person, but her patience, after two years, has run out. She’s threatening to sue Harrison County commissioners over the need to expand the physical space her office needs to accommodate the ongoing flood of people who use it…
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All’s we can say is “WOW!” Last Friday the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD) signed another (new) lease with Antero Resources to lease more than 6,300 acres in and around Piedmont Lake, in Guernsey, Harrison and Belmont counties in Ohio. The land is in prime Utica Shale territory and Antero must have wanted it bad, because they paid a $15,000 per acre signing bonus. Plus 20% in royalties for anything produced from the land. That is, by far, the largest bonus payment we have ever heard of in the Marcellus and Utica region.
This story is almost a month old, but somehow it missed our otherwise good radar. It involves landowners who want to sell their already-leased acreage royalty rights to investors–“flipping” the rights to royalties they may or may not get at some future point for money on the barrel head now. In this case, the landowner considering doing the flipping is the Village of Cadiz (Harrison County), OH, and the company that wants to buy their royalty rights is Flatiron Financial. Flatiron, you may recall, recently purchased a bunch of leases from some of Ohio’s Amish farmers (see 
As part of a story about the Morgan County (OH) Landowner Group, or MCLG (see our companion story today), near the end of the story we get this short mention which, although an “off-hand” comment, comes as a startling thunderclap to MDN about the sheer number of millionaires created by the Utica Shale (i.e. “shaleonaires”):