City Records Clean-Up Will Take Less Time But Still Cost $168,000

By Pru Sowers

Konk Life Staff Writer

A mess that Key West City Hall employees made when they packed up legal documents and records prior to moving out of the old city hall in 2012 will be cleaned up in two years, not the three originally estimated.

Key West City Clerk Cheri Smith asked city commissioners at their Oct. 7 meeting to approve spending $112,000 to finish the job to inventory the contents of 2,357 document boxes currently being stored in Tampa. That expense is on top of $56,000 spent in the last fiscal year to complete phase I of the project, which Smith initially thought would total three phases and three years.

“Staff has determined that this can be accomplished in two phases with a very diligent effort, and complete[d] this fiscal year,” Smith told Mayor Craig Cates and city commissioners in a memo.

The speeded up effort will cost the same amount of money despite the shorter completion date. The contractor originally was hired to do Phase 1 and who was approved by commissioners for the final Phase 2 is SML, Inc., an informational analysis and design company based in Vero Beach, Fla.

The city has stored documents at Certified Records Management (CRM), a Tampa facility specializing in municipal document storage, for about 13 years. But the problem began when city employees moved out of the City Hall Annex at 604 Simonton Street into the current facility at Habana Plaza, 3126 Flagler Ave., three years ago, Smith said.

Despite instructions to put an inventory list on each packed box listing its contents, that didn’t happen. When Smith later went to the Tampa storage facility and looked at about 20 randomly selected boxes, each one was “in shambles,” she said at the time.

“Due to unforeseen circumstances by the city clerk’s office, records were sent to CRM in an unprofessional manner with no indexing, together with records that should have never been sent,” Smith said in her Sept. 28th memo to commissioners.

All Florida cities are legally required to retain public records. City Hall staff received training a few years ago on record retention. However, many municipal departments city departments neglected to inventory their document boxes. Smith didn’t name the negligent offices but mentioned that commercial building plans, kept by the building services department, were part of the problem.

The city is also moving towards digital storage of all documents. But that requires that the contents of all stored document boxes be scanned and put into a master computerized list. That program will take about three years to complete.

“The city has implemented a new imaging system working towards the elimination of the need for a storage facility eventually,” Smith said.

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