County clerk recommends dropping records-tracking software; staff to continue manual tracking while towns receive new tabulators

The Sawyer County clerk reported to the Administrative Committee that a records-request tracking service the county has used for about a year is not delivering the expected value and that the county has 60 days to decide on renewing a roughly $5,000 annual contract.

The clerk said the vendor recently added an online-payment portal that would raise the first-year cost to about $9,000 (the clerk cited $3,000 plus a setup fee around $1,300 in addition to the $5,000 renewal). She told the committee the product has not produced reliable time-tracking data across departments, that much of the request volume is concentrated in the sheriff's department, and that several departments have not consistently entered the time metrics the software expects.

The clerk said the sheriff's office logged 273 records requests through the service in one year while other departments logged far fewer. “We're paying $9,000 a year to track this, basically,” she said, adding that many routine inquiries take “30 seconds” and that staff often respond without using the system.

Committee members and staff discussed whether the decision to continue the subscription is a clerk-level decision or should come to the committee. The clerk said the record-custodian responsibility is statutory and that discontinuing the service would save about $9,000 a year; several members expressed support for continuing the current manual approach and for letting the clerk manage tracking at her discretion.

Separately, the clerk reported on election equipment: the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) is reviewing touchscreen machines that use QR codes (referred to as ICX machines in the meeting). The clerk said vendor Command Central has offered to exchange those units for a different tabulator (referred to as ICE in the meeting) at no charge to participating towns, which would mean towns moving from a $3,900 unit to a roughly $9,000 unit as a one-time swap the vendor will cover.

The clerk also described assisting the Village of Coudreaux to meet a July 1 maintenance-of-effort (MOE) filing with the Wisconsin Department of Revenue to avoid a 15% shared-revenue penalty; the clerk said she was allowed by DOR staff to file on the village's behalf because the village had no clerk on staff and that action likely saved the village about $11,000 in shared revenue.

The committee did not take a formal vote on renewing the records-tracking service during the meeting; members discussed continuing manual tracking coordinated by the clerk and assessing departmental recordkeeping practices.

Direct quotes in this article are drawn from the county clerk's report to the Administrative Committee as recorded in the meeting transcript.