Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Records Preservation topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
County clerk urges investment in records preservation and proposes higher clerk pay
Summary
Harrison County’s clerk, Sherry Griffith, outlined a multi-year preservation and digitization plan with a vendor pickup model and asked the court to consider raising the minimum clerk wage to $17/hour (from about $15) to help retain trained staff who handle substantial financial and court-reporting responsibilities.
Sherry Griffith, identified in the hearing as the county clerk/district clerk office lead, told the Harrison County Commissioners’ Court she placed a preservation and digitization proposal in this year’s packet and asked the court to consider funding it. She said an out-of-county vendor (based in Dallas) would visit quarterly, pick up boxes of old files (some from the 1800s and early 1900s), conserve and re-sleeve brittle material, create digital copies, return certified paper copies for county certification and upload records to a cloud repository. Griffith said the vendor will be paid monthly as they process records and that completing the backlog could take several years; the office will start with roughly 500 of the oldest cases and work forward.
Griffith told the court the county has preservation funds available: she referenced two preservation-related funds and said one had a balance she stated as 148,000 (the clerk also described a separate larger balance that was growing each year). She said routine expenses such as file folders (recently invoiced at over $9,000) will be paid from existing budgets. Griffith asked that the court consider using preservation funds or other budget lines to start the digitization work and noted the vendor will provide digital files that could be integrated into the county’s Tyler system for public access.
Separately, Griffith requested an increase in travel funding to send a clerk to the county and district clerk conference in late January/early February; she said part of the conference cost is typically reimbursed by a judiciary grant. She also pressed the court to raise minimum hourly pay for clerks from the roughly $15 currently paid to at least $17, arguing that clerks manage significant financial responsibilities (including accounts totaling roughly $10.97 million and minor registry accounts totaling about $654,000) and that higher pay would reduce turnover and protect institutional knowledge.
Court members asked about timeline and who would handle public requests and prints; Griffith answered that her office would continue to certify copies and receive fees for certified copies, and that the vendor maintains on-call staff to mail requested records to the clerk’s office for certification. Griffith said she has an existing clerk who scans older records daily and is making progress on the backlog.
The court did not vote on the preservation funding or the clerk pay proposal during this session; members noted available balances and said they would take the requests into account in budget deliberations.
