County agencies receive record retention funds

Nearly $100,000 in grants were awarded by Legislature to local government agencies in San Juan County for record protection and preservation.

“These grants are vital to small government entities that rely on them to assist with their records storage,” said state archivist Steve Excell. “Without this program, many of these historical records would be withering away in a closet in a forgotten back room. Thankfully, this year the Legislature extended the local records grant program so cities and counties can continue receiving state assistance managing their records.”

The local records grant program program was adopted by Legislature in 2017 to help improve municipal governments with record retention, management and disclosure. Any local government agency or entity is eligible including cities, counties, fire districts, hospital districts, towns, schools and more.

The following was granted this year:

• The Cattle Point Water District was awarded $2,500 to purchase a laptop capable of archiving, storing and distributing records.

• Fisherman Bay Sewer District received $10,000 to purchase a flatbed scanner and computer with a portable hard drive for the office; a large format document scanner with dual monitor computer for the processing plant; and five licenses for eFileCabinet Advantage and optical character recognition software

• Port of Friday Harbor was granted three licenses for Adobe Acrobat Pro 2017 to generate searchable and secure electronic documents.

• San Juan County received $30,000 to centralize county records into a management system that can manage, store, retain and destroy all 19 of the county’s individual departments’ documents in accordance to the state’s retention schedules.

• San Juan County Assessor’s Office was granted $17,800 to digitize historic 43,000 records, which will greatly response time and efficiency of access.

• San Juan County Fire Protection District 4 received $28,100 to purchase five Panasonic Toughbook tablets; one Dell laptop; six laptop docking workstations for the aforementioned technologies; and software.

• San Juan County Public Hospital District No. 1 received $1,900 for shredding 440 gallons of unneeded documents; archiving records; sorting records for retention, destruction or storage; and purchasing metal shelves.

• San Juan County Public Hospital District No. 2 was awarded $13,000 to invest in the technology needed to properly comply with public records requests.

• San Juan County Public Hospital District No. 3 received $1,200 to purchase a scanner to digitize physical copies of documents.

• San Juan County Public Works was granted $20,000 to hire a temporary administrative specialist for six months to create a records management database and index records for future access.