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Records office seeks staff, digitization to meet new data-privacy and retention rules
Summary
County administrators told commissioners the records and data-privacy workload has grown and requested one new records position to handle retention-date assignment and digitization of aging materials tied to recent state law changes.
County administration told the commission Sept. 4 that the records and data-privacy program is confronting a large, time-sensitive workload driven by recent state legislative and policy changes and that staff will seek one additional position to help meet new requirements.
"We have 11,549,446 documents that have not been assigned retention dates," Ezra, the county administrator, said, citing the scale of work the records office faces under new state requirements. He also said the county holds about 10,000 aging microfilms that must be digitized because they are not preserved on long-term archival film.
Ezra said two recently cited state bills (identified in the presentations as HB 491 and HB 444) increase the scope of retention- and privacy-related responsibilities for county records. He said staff plan to use optical-character-recognition (OCR) and other automation tools to accelerate work but noted that manual review will still be required because the technology is not yet perfectly reliable for the county—s legacy documents.
The records unit also told commissioners the county—s new records building, scheduled to open at the end of the year, will include a public-facing area to let researchers and members of the public request and access records; that service will increase staff time for retrieval and public assistance, staff said. The records team said some documents are being requested under new programs that provide tax or historic preservation incentives, which has also increased public requests.
County administration requested one additional records-management position to support digitization, retention-date assignment and public-facing retrieval work; presenters said the role would help the county comply with state retention requirements and improve access for residents and researchers.
Staff did not ask the commission to adopt any immediate policy changes at the session; the request was presented as a budget-year personnel request for FY26.
