Josie Delvin has a heavy load as Benton County Clerk. And most of it -- about 5,200 boxes weighing more than 25 pounds each -- are public records that must be preserved and stored.
Delvin told county commissioners this week that she has run out of room for the archives.
"I'm in trouble. I've exceeded the weight limit on the second floor," Delvin said, referring to storage areas in the Benton County Justice Center in Kennewick and the upper level at the county courthouse in Prosser.
With more than 5 million pages needing to be preserved and more piling up daily, Delvin said the situation is urgent.
Delvin told commissioners she has found a way out of the crisis, but it will cost $2,720
a month just to store what the county has.
Delvin said a records storage company in Pasco can provide storage and indexing for up to 13,000 boxes for the next decade.
The 10-year price tag would be about $520,000.
Delvin said Records Management Services in Pasco also would provide data entry, bar-coding containers and a courier service when needed for storing and retrieving files.
Benton County's records storage problem could be solved by putting the documents on microfilm, but Delvin says that is far more costly than renting a storage facility in Pasco.
"The state will charge $1 million to scan (our) 5 million documents," Delvin said. That is more than three times what Records Management Services would charge to store and maintain those records.
Putting the records on compact disc files won't help because the state has not accepted CD storage as secure enough for permanent retention, Delvin said.
"I have boxes stacked on the second floor and exceeding the weight limit. I've had boxes lining the hallways. And I'm not the only department that has this problem," she told commissioners this week.
The area where Delvin keeps hundreds of files at the Justice Center was built as office space and does not have the steel reinforcement in the concrete floor to hold up tons of paper, she said.
Delvin said the state requires that records be kept, but only as original records or as microfilmed documents.
"When the state mandates the keeping of the records I wish they'd also mandate the funding for the keeping," Commissioner Leo Bowman told Delvin.
This is the second time Delvin raised the records storage issue with commissioners. The first time was in December when commissioners asked her to look into off-site storage.
But commissioners had "sticker shock" when they heard it would cost $6 a year to store one box of records.
The fee for retaining 5,440 boxes in 2008 would be $32,640 but with more records piling up, there would be nearly 13,000 boxes by 2017, for an annual tab of nearly $77,000, Delvin said.
"I can't see us spending $520,000 over the next 10 years," said Max Benitz Jr. after hearing Delvin's report.
Benitz said commissioners would take up the records storage issue again when the board meets March 10 to consider facility needs.
"I hope to get some clear direction then," Benitz said.
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