Desoto County enlisting help to battle piles of paperwork
“There’s purchasing orders, here’s Board of Supervisor orders, and there’s some board minutes,” said County Administrator Vanessa Lynchard, navigating a narrow lane in the third-f loor “mechanical room” — now a claustrophobic storage closet — of the DeSoto County Administration Building.
Squirming by along with Lynchard was Supervisor Lee Caldwell of Nesbit.
The room was packed nearly to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of records. Up high on one far corner was the holidaythemed Toys for Tots box for Christmastime donations.
“That’s the only box in here that’s not full,” said Caldwell.
She called out to Lynchard: “How do you find anything in here?”
“We have our own system,” came the reply. “We know this space is for that, that corner is for this.” Lynchard noted it gets more surreal, saying “the Accounting Department stores all their overflow at the Road Department.”
Earlier last week, at Monday’s meeting of the Board of Supervisors, Lynchard described Human Resources “in a bad, bad way” and other departments hardly better on records storage. Another wave of documents to be boxed, she said, and the board risked losing its own conference room.
“That’s what we’re down to,” said Lynchard, who asked for some special summer help.
“It’s become a critical issue, and what seems our best option is to get older records scanned and then get caught up with the newer records,” she said.
The Administration Building houses at least 12 departments. In addition to HR, Accounting and the Supervisors, there’s Tax Collector, Tax Assessor, Planning, Geographic Information, Emergency Services, District Attorney, DeSoto Regional Utility Authority, Administrative Services and Procurement, and Information Technology.
Lynchard asked for three temporary workers, and will start with two, to scan and digitalize files for IT director John Mitchell to ease the storage crunch. The supervisors quickly approved $20,000 from the fiscal 2013 ending-cash account to get the process going to replace piles of paper.
“We think we may end up with three helpers, but we’ll see how it goes with two,” Lynchard said later. “We hope to have the first two ready for approval by the next Board of Supervisors meeting on June 17.” This project, she added, “will save hundreds of thousands of dollars for the county in the long run.”
There’s no specific end date to the scanning: “We just see this work going on till the end of summer, possibly into September.”
On the second f loor, Human Resources director Janna Rogers refers to the third-floor storage site as “the dungeon.” But her own offices are filling fast: workers’ comp paperwork, injury files, billings and invoices for insurance claims, plus mandatory drug-screening records which have to be kept separate from everything else.
Rogers says she welcomes the scanning. “Keeping records digitally is cheaper than constructing a new building,” she said.
HR must keep some personnel records 55 years — after the affected employee leaves — while the Planning Department on the other second-floor wing must keep building permit records “permanently — forever,” said Connie Scott, operations manager. Next door to HR, the Accounting office is piled deep with claims docket files, grant papers and year-end reports.
Planning director Ted Garrod sees the project and the pile as “an issue of accessibility. Paper records in files and boxes are less accessible and retrievable than records stored digitally.” So storage also reaches the level of transparency and accountability.
On the first floor in the county Emergency Services office is D.W. Gilbert, deputy director to the chief, Bobby Storey. Lynchard gives Gilbert the credit for starting the cyber-ball rolling on records storage. In February, he and Storey presented a policy and procedures proposal for digital or “cloud” storage of public files, incorporating backup and compliance with rules of the state Archives and History office and other agencies.