The request is for temporary staffing to assist the Clerk’s office with Records Management for electronic files. This is a one-time request.

As part of the Laserfiche project, the City Clerk’s office is in the process of establishing stronger records management guidelines and practices to meet State Statutes for records retention. In our initial review, there has been a tremendous amount of electronic files stored on network servers over the years, and while records dispositioning is occurring across various departments, it’s not at the needed level due to the sheer volume. As a result, many records have been retained beyond the required retention schedules and are continuing to accumulate, even in duplication in some cases. There are also costs associated with excessive storage and back-up of these electronic files. With stricter State guidelines in place with regards to public documents, and public records requests on the rise, the City intends to implement more current and improved practices in records management moving forward.

The City has begun a Lean process to bring its records management process in alignment with the most recent State laws and rules. This includes the recent purchase of Laserfiche software, which will play a pivotal role moving forward. However, upon roll out it became apparent that for the most efficient and organized implementation, critical work must be completed to purge and organize literally hundreds of thousands of the City’s current electronic files, which is also taking up more and more server space. These electronic files need to be reviewed, archived or tagged as “essential/permanent”, or destroyed per the Washington State retention schedule. Staff analyzed the amount of files and determined that the time that would be needed for current staff to be able to review and process the files accordingly would be immense, on top of their already full workloads.

The Clerk’s office requests temporary staffing for 2019 and possibly into 2020. This temporary staffing would consist of the equivalent of one full-time temporary employee, provided through a staffing agency, to assist all departments in the City with the necessary review, archiving or disposition of its aged electronic records. The added staff could either assist directly in the review and processing of files, or could assist the departmental staff who are responsible for the files in other ways, which would free them up to do the needed processing. The expenditure request covers salaries and fees (benefits) as required by the staffing agency and could be fulfilled either through part-time or full-time staffing to equal 1 FTE.