Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, August 17, 2010,
Item 1
Item number 1 is a public hearing to receive comments regarding the fiscal year 2011 district clerk's records management plan.
>> move the public hearing be open.
>> second.
>> all in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. With commissioner gomez absented today. Anybody here from the district clerk's office?
>> yes, sir. We have announced a public hearing. If you could just take a minute to maybe summarize what the plan is.
>> okay, this is a two-part plan, michelle brinkman from the travis county district clerk's office. We have what we call fund number 005, and you can see the expenditures we are proposing starting at the bottom of page 2 of the plan. We have some personnel that we are funding out of this plan. One of them is a special project worker. And we also have a programmer. The special project worker is for archives purposes. We are pushing very hard to identify any historical records that we might have that should be preserved. You may have read recently in the media that there are some records that had been stolen from the state. Some of those records originated in travis county. They date back to the days of prior to the civil war and shortly after, and these records are being auctioned online. And there is an effort to identify those records that are being offered for sale online that were taken and return them to the state's possession. So we've been going forward with this project for a couple of years and we're continuing it to have someone go through all the old records, identify what is historically significant so it can be preserved. That's what that worker is for. The other worker that we have is for -- it's a business analyst 3. This is a position that was essentially placed on loan to our office. It was originally budgeted with i.t.s. And i.t.s. Has released the position and as part of the budget we have agreed to fund this position out of this particular fund. I will caution that's not something we can continue to do because the fund does not bring in enough money every year to pay for everything that we have going on, but we had built up quite a reserve of money available in the fund. So for f.y. 11, we have agreed with planning and budget that we would continue to fund this position. This is a very important position to us. It's the person who is essentially our data expert. We have reporting that has to go to the state, a higher level of reporting for the office of court administration starting actually next month with the state's fiscal year. We also have the electronics records disposition and we believe this person could be instrumental in meeting the state requirements for reporting criminal histories to d.p.s. So it's essential to our operations, and i just wanted to let you know that we are continuing to fund from this, but expect in the future that we may have this -- request this position be funded from the general revenue. That sums up 055. There is also another fund, it's the 070 fund. This is a fairly new fund that was -- from a fee that was authorized last legislative session. This particular fund is dedicated to projects for digitizing court records. And that is exactly what we are proposing here. This position that we are asking for would be the person who takes the paper records and converts them to digital format. There is also significant expenditure. I believe you can see that on page 5 of the plan for scanning equipment. And this is the same type of scanner that records management has purchased. It's highly efficient. It's on a conveyor belt and you have to do far less preparation of the case file to be able to scan with this machine. They have done the analysis and found that even though this particular scanner costs more than the typical kind you have, the time savings of having this type of operation is well worth the investment. So we're making the one-time investment in this particular type of scanner, plus we're getting a court clerk assistant position, are proposing that to actually take the files and prepare them for scanning and then scan them.
>> commissioner davis.
>> years ago we looked at a lot of this apparatus, especially trying to make sure that we reduce a lot of the records to some type of format where they could be archived and preserved and these type of operations require less space as far as converting from paper to an example microfiche, digital and putting it in some type of format, electronic format where it can be easily accessed, but not only that reduce our space requirements under the old system or the old way. Where are we overall as far as a lot of the records that we have here in the county as far as looking at those records, where are we in the archiving phase of doing just that? This is pretty critical going from -- going to a paperless-type situation whereby we'll have excess records, but under electronic format. Where are we overall?
>> well, i think we're in excellent shape. We have been digitizing our fisl files since 2004 and creating new paper files in 2005 as far as civil files. Over a year ago, actually in summer of 2008 we started digitizing all new filings coming into the criminal side of operations. And so -- but we're still maintaining the paper files until we can get the courtrooms ready to operate in a paperless way. But everything that we've received in 2008 from the criminal side still is already in digital format. This particular -- and then, of course, we had the project that was going on through, i believe, chase where we had contracted with them to digitize a lot of our old files that are in off-site storage.
>> right.
>> and we're hoping that that project can pick up again. This particular proposal that we have is to fill in sort of a gap there. It's to take criminal files that we already had in our office, most of which are closed cases, but still exist in paper format and convert those to a digital format. There's two reasons to do that. One for archive purposes, like you said, it's cheaper to access, it costs less to store.
>> right.
>> the second is that we still have a bit of a crunch in storing the exhibits that we receive from the court after a trial is done where they introduce exhibits into the record. Eventually those come to us to be stored. And we still have that space crunch. So we hope by freeing up file space by digitizing those records, then we can have more room to store those records that are not necessarily easily digitized like physical objects. They are not all paper records as far as exhibits go. You have different objects, clothing from the crime victim and things like that.
>> right.
>> so this is really what our plan is not only to preserve the records but to free up significant space so we have more storage for the types of things that cannot be digitized.
>> thank you.
>> state law requires you -- authorizes the fund and requires a plan?
>> yes, and the state law specially for the 070 requires this public hearing. That's the reason that we're having it today.
>> and do we ever evaluate the impact of the plan?
>> i'm sorry?
>> do we ever evaluate the impact of the plan?
>> the impact that we evaluate is based on what we accomplish. For example, we'll be able to track how many records are converted to digital format. That's really going to be our gauge. We're also going to be looking at how many what you would call inches of file space we will be able to clear out of our office on an annual basis from doing the scanning.
>> somebody will share that information with the court.
>> this is, i will say, the first time we've really come forward with something like this on the 070 front so next year when we present the plan we'll have that information for you.
>> okay. This is posted for a public hearing and if you would like to give comments, please come forward. Mr. Priest.
>> thank you, judge, commissioners, morris priest speaking on my own behalf. I think we have probably the greatest asset that anyone has available to them and it's the austin history center. And i would hope that the county would work with the austin history center in a collaborative effort. I know that we're all -- everybody is doing their budget hearing. I know this weekend i went down and i picked up quite a few free copies of starting the archive, caring for c.d.s, audio, family photos. But i do think the greatest resource to help the county in this situation is, you know, our austin history center and i was wondering if the county had talked to them because i just feel like they are way ahead of the curve and they've made some great progress in this same area and i was wondering what -- what, if any, contacts you've had with them.
>> i can answer that. We've been collaborating with the history center for several years.
>> all right. Thank you.
>> thank you, mr. Priest. Anybody else for this public hearing? Item number 1.
>> move the public hearing be closed.
>> second.
>> all in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. With commissioner huber temporarily off the dais. This is action item number 28 and will be recommended as part of the consent motion.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 2010 2:30 PM
