My father passed away 2 years ago and he was the owner of inherited mineral rights in Tyler and Doddridge Counties. Since he inherited from his mother, he has been receiving relatively small royalty checks (usually less than $50 once or twice a year). Mother is still alive and I am trying to help her get everything done that needs to be done for her to have clean ownership. The eventual goal is to do any advance work prior to her death to make it easier when the rights are split 4 more ways between her children (myself, being one). Unfortunately, Mom and Dad are/were not good at record keeping and Mom really doesn’t even know the details of what she has and is unable to deal with helping this process.
We all live in Pennsylvania. The only paperwork I find shows that recently the royalty checks came in from Ascent Resources - Marcellus. Based on a letter sent to us by Ascent last year, we used a PA Estate Attorney to probate (in PA) Dad’s will and that provided the required paperwork to Ascent so they would transfer their ownership records to my mother. They sent HER a 1099-Misc for 2018 income taxes. Late last fall, it seems Ascent Resources - Marcellus was “spun” off from Ascent and renamed as Tribune Resources. Just this past week, Tribune resources sent my mother another royalty check for $25.42. Everything appears to be in her name and it shows her having a .0000785 revenue interest in various producing wells in Tyler/Doddridge.
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Can I assume I have done everything we need to do with Tribune Resource (or Ascent)?
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What, if anything do I need to do with Tyler (and Doddridge) County taxation departments. My parents have been paying a small amount of property(?) taxes every year to each of the counties in July. The most recent tax tickets were still in my Dad’s name. What process takes care of changing that to my mother’s name?
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What else do I need to know about that hasn’t even risen to the top yet?
Any guidance from you experts is appreciated.
About changing the name on the county taxes, I suggest you call the assessor’s office in each of the counties to ask about the process. They probably will want you to file a special copy of the Pennsylvania will with the county clerk but there will be other things to do also.
Thank you Nancy. I appreciate your input. I have called the 2 offices and received different responses. One said I don’t need to do anything because the data they use to calculate taxes is provided to them each year by the operators, including the person who is taxed. The other one told me I needed to contact the County Clerk and discuss the process of registering the will and other documents. I suspect the latter needs to be done in both counties, but I probably wasn’t clear in my first call. I’m going to put that aspect of my research on hold for a bit, while I focus on gathering my facts more first. We will still receive the tax bills even if they are sent to my deceased father and we will pay them.
Trusts and Transfer on Death Deeds can pass real property (and minerals) free of probate. Wills do not avoid probate but can alter distributions that might otherwise pass by intestacy.
Too often I get calls from people that say “dad had a trust” but dad never deeded the minerals into it. This is easy to avoid with a simple deed to trust before death. After death a probate is needed.
Visit with an attorney on which is best.
You’re going to get different answers from the different counties about how to change the names on the tax tickets. It’s frustrating because they’re all working off the same set of laws, but there are 55 different ways of interpreting those laws. It’s…fun? My front office gets to deal with most of it–those gals are great.
The .0000785 revenue interest that you mention is your share in a production unit. If you added all the revenue interests in the unit up they would (theoretically) add up to 1.00000000. What that means is that everyone who owns mineral or royalty rights in the production unit has a small share of that unit. So, let’s say that Tribune has drilled one well and that well is producing from 100 acres (just to make things a little easy). You would multiply 100x0.0000785 to get the number of acres you own. You would then multiply by your royalty amount and the amount of production to get your royalty. You might have to deduct post-production costs from that.
As far as whether you’ve done everything you need to with Tribune for your mother, well, if you’re getting royalty checks for everything that she owns that is producing then you’re OK. You might want to do some digging to determine whether she could have rights to other minerals that aren’t producing. First step, check the tax records for your dad’s name and her name, then for the name of whoever your dad got his interest in the minerals from. If it looks like there’s nothing left in those names, then you aren’t at risk of losing anything to back taxes (most likely). It’s never a sure thing in WV, as figuring out what any one person owned or could have owned is a big job, but that’s a good first step.
Thank you for the guidance, Richard. After I get more of my ducks in order around knowing how this all works, I will indeed enlist an attorney to move us forward to the next steps. My mother is in good health, but age 82. So we never know how long we have to get things cleaned up for the next stage of the process.
Thank you, Kyle. This was very helpful and aligns with my findings so far. So it’s nice to get some validation of my research. I was able to speak with a helpful Division Analyst at Tribune and she gave me some very helpful information. Our original lease goes back to 1898 and it was incorporated into the Stringtown Unit #3 in 1996 by Pennzoil. The Unit has since moved through multiple operating companies and is currently held by Tribune. Using the county document websites I have been able to find a copy of the original 1898 lease as well as the Unitization Agreement for Stringtown #3 (including it’s sketched parcel map). And using the printout of producing wells that Ascent sent my Mom when they transferred the revenue payment system over to her, I have been able to track down about 95% of them using the WV DEP map database and the OOG Well Permit database. I have API #s for most of them now. It is kind of fun to do this level of research. My college degree is in Geography and I took several Geology courses as part of that. So I somewhat feel like I’m using my skills again. I do see how it’s possible there is more out there than the currently producing wells. Especially when I see “Active” wells that appear to be geographically inside the Unit boundaries but don’t seem to be on the list of our revenue printout.
I also have found what appears to be a second original lease for some geography that is outside of the Stringtown Unit boundaries. But I may just not have found the relevant link yet. I’m going to post on that separately at some point. Right now, my research on that runs into a dead end with a copy of the lease only.
If you have found an API and want to see more documentation, here is a website where some well plats and other documents are available. Here is another site: WV Office of Oil and Gas Weekly Reports page You can follow the instructions and log into the Application XTender, then select PERMITSOOG from the left side list. Put in the API as instructed with the 4 zeros at the end. Lots of information there.
Here is another site WV Geological and Economic Survey with a different map (put the API number in, then keep going to find the map. You have to fix it up a little to be able to view things on the map.
Lots of information. Sounds like you have been successful in finding a lot of things about your situation. This might help some more.
Nancy, thank you so much for these new links. You’re right, there is a LOT of good information available in them. This is very helpful and interesting to me.
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