Top stories

Clerk’s budget proposes bringing records back from Erie

Leigh Ann Jordan, the city's new clerk, wants to bring records that were moved out of City Hall during the Tracy Plaza renovation project back to Jamestown.

The City Clerk's budget was among those presented during the final round of 2027 budget presentations to city council on Monday night. Jordan presented the budget along with former clerk Jennifer John. Among the normal budget items such as salaries, the office looking for an account clerk, maintenance fees, dues and subscriptions, travel and education, and other items like postage, a big focus for this office is records storage and management.

The cost for records management in the city clerk's budget pays for offsite storage and records retrieval.

"It's not in the budget, but something to consider, our records are stored offsite in Erie, Pennsylvania and we would need about $50,000 in order to bring those records home, keep them here and go through them," Jordan said. "There's a lot out there."

John said over the years she has tried to retrieve a large amount of the boxes that are out there, and the state decides how long municipalities have to retain records for. Getting the records back home would help with compliance when it comes to that. It would also eliminate a portion of the budgeted $9500 for records management. The boxes currently sit in their storage facility in Erie, with no one doing anything with them, and Jordan noted some records are from when the city first began.

"Those are permanent retention, so a lot of times the boxes will just sit," Jordan said. "If we can get them back here, they can just sit for no cost."

The records were sent to the offsite facility in 2018 during the renovation of the city hall's fourth floor, in an effort to rent out more building space and generate more revenue. Space has been made down in the basement, and John has been sporadically shredding when she can and making space to try and bring those records back, though she noted it will not be easy to deal with all of the records and will be time consuming. She added the company holding the records for them has been great and the wish to bring the records back has nothing to do with them, but rather it is time to stop paying that rent. The city would also be able to eliminate the charge that they have to pay any time they wish to remove any records boxes from the facility.

The money could be recouped by the city in four or five years from the cost of that rent, and that money would then help with preservation of records books. Some records and record books are starting to show their age, going back to 1882, and it was noted that it is important for the city to keep vital records acceptable. The potential to digitize some records with a grant was also discussed, though the city has yet to be awarded a grant for that when they have tried.

While the Department of Development briefly presented their budget before last month's voting session, City Development Director Crystal Surdyk sat down with city council again on Monday to look over some more specific line items on the department's budget. This includes items such as mandatory trainings, brownfields, and the HCR subcontractor for the city's lead grant program they are doing in partnership with the county.

"In partnership with the county health department we applied for and received funding for lead remediation," Surdyk said. "So that is our consultant that we hired to administer the grant."

Other items of note included a wage increase, working to get houses back on the city's tax roll, how much it would cost to let the department get two more code enforcement officers, and the strategy behind deciding whether a property should be rehabilitated or demolished.