AB 1466, signed into law in 2021, requires California county recorders to identify and redact racially restrictive covenants in their recorded property documents. San Francisco’s records span 7.4 million pages across 11,650 record books, and fewer than 0.4% of those pages contain covenant language.
The challenge
Finding the covenants is only the first step. Each one then has to be:
- Redacted
- Indexed, with its instrument number, recording date, grantors, and address
- Given a cover sheet with statutory citations
- Approved by county counsel
- Rerecorded into the official record
That work falls to scarce, specialized staff, county counsel among them. Vendor contracts for AB 1466 compliance have run into the mid-seven figures, and many counties have had staff review tens to hundreds of thousands of deeds by hand just to find the covenants.
What we built
Mesa for Public Records handles the whole process, from raw deed scans to compliant, rerecorded redaction packages, in four phases.
- Detection. A machine learning model scans every page and flags the ones likely to contain covenant language. In San Francisco it identified roughly 15,000 covenant documents in the 7.4 million pages.
- Processing. Each flagged document is run through OCR, split into multi-page deeds, and given extracted fields and precise redaction boundaries.
- Review. Staff open each prepared redaction packet in a web interface: an AI-drafted cover sheet on one side, the document with its redactions overlaid on the other. When the draft is right, as it was for eight in ten packets by the end, a reviewer confirms it in under 30 seconds. Corrections typically take under two minutes.
- Approval and export. County counsel reviews approved packets in bulk, and Mesa generates the exports for rerecording.
By the end, accuracy on individual fields ranged from 96% to 99%. Mesa prepares each packet, and staff make every decision about what is redacted and rerecorded.
Results
Work that would have taken 62 person-years by hand took nine person-weeks. Someone hired for the job straight out of college would have retired before finishing it alone. San Francisco cleared the entire backlog in nine months, finishing in August 2026, with nine part-time staff: eight preparers and one county counsel reviewer.
Reviewers completed 59 packets per active hour on average, and the fastest regularly exceeded 90.
From person-years to person-weeks
Share of San Francisco’s AB 1466 backlog completed, by month
MesaFinished in eight months
Other solutionsAn ongoing, yearslong effort
Working with San Francisco’s staff
San Francisco’s team brought deep knowledge of recording conventions, historical document formats, and the edge cases only experienced staff recognize. As they worked, Mesa learned from the patterns in their corrections, until eight in ten packets were approved without edits. Each round of improvement left staff more time for the complex cases, and those cases in turn taught the system more.
Beyond AB 1466
AB 1466 was one project. Mesa also supports the day-to-day work of an assessor’s office:
- Legal and policy research. Mesa for Research answers questions on change in ownership, base-year value under Props 8, 13, and 19, exemptions and exclusions, new construction, possessory interests, and transfer tax. Each answer is tied to the code section, case law, BOE guidance, or Assessor’s Handbook provision it relies on. Mesa can also check proposed legislation and internal policy changes against existing law.
- Appraisal support. Mesa reviews appraisals against California law, builds valuation workbooks for complex properties, and prepares comparable-sales exhibits and locator maps for assessment appeals.
- Mapping and title research. Mesa searches BLM land records, Williamson Act enrollment, county GIS, and other public sources to support legal descriptions, boundary questions, and appeal exhibits.
- Internal search. Connected to your document repositories, such as SharePoint, Mesa finds the information, forms, and reports scattered across your office’s systems.
- Public records requests. Mesa for Public Records reviews and redacts documents, video, and audio according to your office’s policies and the exemptions you already apply.
- Everyday documents. Staff use Mesa to draft appeals-board responses, taxpayer correspondence, reports, and training materials.