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Clerk tells commissioners backlog of paper records and staff turnover requires higher starting pay and extra positions
Summary
The clerk of court told commissioners the office holds thousands of boxes and files that need scanning and retention work, and requested FY26 budget changes to raise entry salaries and add two staff positions to IT and finance to address cybersecurity, scanning and audit workload.
The clerk of the circuit court asked commissioners to consider higher entry pay and two new positions to address an information‑technology and records backlog, saying the office holds thousands of boxes and millions of pages of paper that require scanning, retention review and staffing.
‘‘We have 2,370 boxes of files … approximately 7 million pages of paper’’ the clerk said, describing storage on the Second Floor and two rooms of drawer files he told the board contain roughly 115,000 files. He said some of the material should have been destroyed years ago but must first be scanned and verified for legal retention and evidentiary value.
The clerk said recruiting and retention are a problem: the office has lost roughly 10% of staff in the past year, and local private‑sector and nearby governments are offering higher pay. He proposed raising starting pay for entry‑level clerk positions to $19 an hour (from about $15 currently) and asked for two enhanced positions: an additional IT technician focused on cybersecurity and a higher‑qualified accounting position to help with audits and accounting oversight.
The clerk said he has used temporary staff to help ‘‘back‑scan’’ older files but that progress is slow. He provided rough cost estimates he said would allow the office to begin a sustained records digitization effort, noting one commercial scanning estimate he received was in the low millions.
The clerk also outlined other customer services his office provides — passports, marriage ceremonies and financial transactions — and noted IT workloads: his team logged roughly 4,000 help desk work orders this year and monitors frequent cybersecurity access attempts. Commissioners asked for a tour of the storage rooms and said they understood the difficulty of balancing archival needs with available space and staff.
