Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
vault tome
vault boxes
Above: One of the large tomes relocated in the move holds handwritten accounts from commissioners’ proceedings in 1915 and 1916.
At right: Commissioner Michael Largent unloads boxes in the first floor vault. The boxes are labeled with the department they hail from and when to destroy the records therein.
Commissioners and county staff got a little bit of a workout Jan. 4 moving tomes and boxes of records from the second floor vault to the first floor vault at the county courthouse.
“We’re trying to make some method out of years’ worth of madness,” said Commissioner Michael Largent, who was conscripted into the manual labor of pushing a handcart loaded with boxes.
Largent is also a member of the Space Allocation Committee which worked to address storage needs of the different county departments in the limited storage capacity at the courthouse.
“This has been a department-wide effort to clean out, organize,” Largent said.
He credited Jill Whelchel, Superior Court clerk, with a lot of the planning work, stating he was “very impressed” with her organizational skills.
Much of the move was to make more room for the clerk’s office which must retain records from the superior and district courts. The clerk already had files stored in the upstairs vault, an old boiler room which was converted into storage and another office room.
The county must save all public records, whether it be physical copies or scanned into archives. Documents have legal retention periods dictating how long they must be kept whether on-premise or physical copies before being destroyed.
Part of the re-organization included clearing out items like Christmas decorations that had been stashed in the vaults by various individuals.
“It’s our version of spring cleaning,” said Largent.
With the new allocations, the upstairs vault will contain only files from the clerk and auditor’s offices. The first floor vault now houses documents for all the first floor departments including commissioners, human resources, assessor and prosecutor.
Retention and access of the files depends on their nature and purpose. Extra fencing and gates will be brought into the first floor vault to restrict access to sensitive files such as court records.
The vaults are concrete rooms in the northeast corner of the courthouse. While the two floors are connected by a narrow spiral staircase, the boxes had to be loaded onto carts and moved via the courthouse elevator.
Jana Mathia is a reporter at the Whitman County Gazette.
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