Corporate Restructuring – Electric Utility
American Electric Power, an electric utility based in Columbus, Ohio, retained NSIC&D to assist with the process of preparing their real estate assets for transfer under a corporate restructuring initiative, which was, in part, driven by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2000, which called for the business of transmission to be separate and independent from market participation, and various State directives. This restructuring initiative called for over 200,000 properties to be reassigned to newly formed subsidiaries (i.e., Transmission, Generation, Distribution) in a portion of AEP’s 11-state territory. At the project’s outset, AEP was aware of the assets that needed to be transferred, but the real estate records for those assets were intertwined with other assets that would be retained or had not been cataloged so they could be transferred.
To assist AEP with this project, NSI supplied a team of real estate executives who worked onsite at the AEP facility in Gahanna, Ohio, to identify and catalog those properties to be transferred to the new entities. NSI personnel analyzed deeds and site plans to identify those rights to be transferred and helped prepare new deeds and easement documents to effectuate the transfer under the newly established subsidiaries. NSI personnel also worked with county recorders to prepare the transfer documents for filing.
Simultaneously, NSI provided a team of professionals who began the process of converting AEP’s existing right-of-way records into digital format and capturing information on each record for inclusion in a database. Using this database, NSI could catalog and quantify the records and organize them into appropriate groupings for filing with the counties. Also, using this record set, NSI identified gaps in the records and obtained new copies from the recorder’s office for inclusion in the dataset.
Not only could NSI provide the necessary personnel and expertise to facilitate this unique one-time project, but a by-product of NSI’s efforts is that AEP now possesses a much more comprehensive record set and can more easily manage their existing land rights. Also, AEP utilized the scanned images captured by NSI and incorporated them into their internal database record system. As a result, records are easier to retrieve, and the information can be backed up regularly, thereby providing security for the real estate information assets.