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Board approves summer hire to digitize county parcel files, funded from zoning assistant savings
Summary
Goodhue County approved hiring a summer worker to scan and index decades of paper parcel files, using savings from a budgeted but unfilled zoning assistant position.
The Goodhue County Board of Commissioners approved a summer hire for land use to digitize parcel files and related records.
Land use staff told the board the county’s parcel records are largely paper for years before roughly the mid-2000s and that the department wants to scan and index files (variances, conditional uses, building permits, mining registrations, violations and other records) now stored in roughly 20 packed file cabinets. The goal is to preserve brittle paper records and place them in a backed-up digital system for long-term access.
Staff proposed funding the summer position from salary savings in the budgeted zoning assistant line (budgeted at $87,800 for 2025), hiring a temporary summer worker at $17.50 per hour for approximately 35–40 hours per week. Personnel committee recommended approval, and the board approved the hire. Staff said the work is expected to be multi-year and that the summer position will perform document scanning, indexing and occasional packet assembly for planning boards.
The county will post the zoning assistant position as planned and expects the summer help role to fill the near-term scanning work until a permanent staffer starts later in the year. Commissioners who spoke described the project as preservation-focused and said they expected the work to continue across multiple summers until files are migrated into the county’s digital records system.
