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Redondo Beach launches multi-year records digitization push; AWS funds $80,000 proof‑of‑concept
Summary
City staff reported a multi-phase plan to expand Laserfiche use, scan historical building plans, and pilot Amazon Web Services tools to auto-extract data; council received the update and approved continuing the pilot and procurement work.
The Redondo Beach City Council received an update on a multi-year records-digitization program designed to reduce paper, increase public access, and preserve archival materials.
Director Cook (IT) and City Clerk Eleanor Menzal described progress expanding the city’s Laserfiche environment (about 2.5 million documents currently), the destruction of nearly 1,000 boxes of records identified as past retention periods, and ongoing efforts to prepare tens of thousands of large-format plan sets for scanning. Staff said the city receives roughly 250 building-permit public-records requests a year—an operational burden digitization aims to reduce.
The city is running a proof-of-concept with Amazon Web Services to use machine learning to classify and extract key fields from scanned plans and records. "Amazon is actually footing the bill on this... It's about $80,000 worth of work that Amazon is just doing for us," Director Cook said, describing the vendor-supported pilot. Staff reported phase‑1 funding is available to run a scanning pilot and that further budget requests for additional departments will likely be brought forward in subsequent fiscal years.
Council members pressed for clarity about preserving historically significant materials, retention schedules and how editable formats (for internal use) will be handled; staff said final, approved records would be archived as PDFs for public access while editable originals (AutoCAD, GIS files) would be retained in internal systems for operational use. The council moved to receive and file the status update; the motion passed unanimously.
Next steps: staff will return with vendor contracting details, a phased budget plan for additional departments, and recommended public-facing search and access improvements.
