Budget Request 2019-2020
Detailed Decision Package
Administrative Services - Clerk's Office
Temporary Staffing - Records Management Assistant
The request is for temporary staffing to assist
the Clerk’s office with Records Management for electronic files. This is a one-time
request.
Background
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.
Current situation
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.
Proposed solution
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.