County clerk sits on $15 million fund
If you file for a marriage license in Harris County, you get charged a $10 fee for records management and preservation. Your title company adds the same $10 to your tab if you buy a house here. And you pay that same fee if you open a business.
You may wonder what county officials do with this money.
As it happens, for the 2016 budget year, the Harris County Clerk’s Office has accumulated a surplus of $15.5 million in records management and preservation fees charged to customers in court, vital records and property matters. While the surplus represents a lot of money, there is no statutory mandate that it be spent.
The fees paid for paper, postage, computers, servers and software at the clerk’s office, said Daniel Sumrall, administrator of courts and finance for the county clerk. They went toward restoring and preserving records dating to 1836 from more than 15,000 books. They covered salaries for five archivists and five information technology staffers and a new van for moving records to and from a wareh ouse.
County Clerk Stan Stanart kicked over $1 million of his money to District Clerk Chris Daniel last year to help convert court documents dating to 1900 to digital format. Daniel needs another $1.7 million to convert criminal court records to digital, and Stanart said he might be willing to help cover some of that cost.
The district clerk col-
lects a similar fee, but it generates much less revenue. Daniel said his balance from the records management and preservation fees remains relatively flat each year. He retains an average surplus of $464,000.
A third department that generates money from these fees is Commissioners Court. Its estimated year-end balance is $700,000, said Paul Scott of Central Technology Services, which manages the court’s incoming records revenue.
In contrast, each year the county clerk collects an average of $5.7 million from people filing new documents. Once expenses are tabulated, the county clerk’s office still has millions remaining in its pot. Stanart held onto $20.3 million in the 2015 fiscal year and kept $16.5 million in fiscal 2014.
Bexar County also held onto a significant pot. Records provided by County Clerk Gerard Rickhoff’s office showed an average balance of $12.7 million from records revenue in the last seven fiscal years. Fort Bend’s county clerk had an average balance of $189,000 from the fee during the same time period, according to the county auditor.
No expiration date
The records management and preservation fee dates back to 1991, said John Kennedy, a senior analyst at the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, a nonpartisan, member-supported service that analyzes fiscal policy for businesses and the public. It came about during a push for getting old records automated and preserved on microfilm.
A decade later, counties and archives-preservation companies lobbied for a separate records archive fund to cover the hefty costs of preserving brittle, yellowing books, historic maps and documents.
That fee, approved by the Legislature in 2001, provided a technology fund — which was slated to expire in 2008 — for county and district clerks along the Mexican border and the Gulf of Mexico whose general funds were strapped for cash.
Clerks would no longer have to plead with their commissioners courts to cover preservation costs out of their counties’ general fund. The money generated had to be spent on specific projects, and their commissioners courts had to approve the expenses.
In subsequent years, the Legislature lifted the expiration date and extended the law to clerks in any Texas county who wanted to charge a records management and preservation fee.
In 2011, lawmakers tweaked the language so that the fee no longer needed to be tied to a specific project. Clerks could keep generating revenue indefinitely to pay for continuous improvement of their archives, said Don Lee, executive director of the Texas Conference of Urban Counties, who supported the measure in the state Senate.
The amount of the fee can vary by county. Harris County charges $5 for records management and another $5 for archival costs, but Stanart noted that he hasn’t raised those costs during his five years in office.
‘Nice chunk of change’
Stanart does not view his $15.5 million as an embarrassment of riches; he sees the stockpile as a source of pride.
“You have a lot of counties that depend on that money,” explained Stanart. “Probably because we’re a larger county, we’re more efficient. It probably has built up more than others’.”
The total from one year’s unused collection rolls over to the next. This made it possible for Stanart to come into office with money to spend when his predecessor left office.
“Beverly Kaufman left me a nice chunk of change in there,” Stanart said.
Stanart’s balance doesn’t raise a red flag for Bill Jackson, who manages the county budget but has no direct control over records revenue. Jackson said normally he’d want to know if a department head had a plan for a revenue stream.
“If I see someone’s putting into a bucket and no one’s taking out of the bucket, I’d be concerned,” Jackson said.
He said this wasn’t what the numbers indicated in this case. Preserving records requires a huge investment, so Jackson said he would recommend whoever is clerk maintain at least $10 million in reserves. Spending or sharing what’s in his pot is completely up to Stanart’s discretion under the statute, said Michael Post, who heads the accounting division under County Auditor Barbara Schott.
“I know of nothing in the statue that would force Stan to either spend it or share it. I think that would be his decision,” Post said.
These days, most of Stanart’s revenue goes toward the people and technology necessary to make old records and new filings digital. Stanart used his money to set up banks of computer servers in two locations in the county, so if a disaster strikes in one place, his branch offices can run as if nothing occurred. “We’re kind of paranoid about taking care of the records of the citizens,” he said.
Stanart said he’s been very intentional about holding onto the bulk of the money. He needs $4 million for a new court-management software system because the company the county has been using went out of business. He received bids ranging from $5.6 to $17 million for converting, indexing and redacting 50,000 rolls of records on microfilm, but then he got busy on other projects and hasn’t selected a bidder.
One project that kept him from committing to a vendor for the microfilm conversion was something of a pet project, who has a background in aerospace and circuit design.
Stanart designed and manufactured a prototype for an iPad stand using software and a 3D printer he bought with the records money. He bought 2,400 new iPads out of the general fund and used the records fee to pay for a new app aimed at making it more efficient for poll workers to help voters check in on Election Day.
Stanart said he wants to spend the remaining millions responsibly.
“We have a number of projects we’re going to use that money for,” he said. “I want to do it right and make sure we don’t waste any of it.”