Clinton County has had a huge problem storing records they have to keep.
Well, according to Document Mountain of Kirklin president Kevin Calhoun, it’s a lot more than most people would think.
“We eluded to that there are over 4300 boxes of record upstairs (on the fourth and fifth floors of the Clinton C0unty Courthouse) and each box weighs about 50 pounds a piece,” said Calhoun. “That’s over 200,000 pounds of weight just sitting in this beautiful old building. I’d hate for something to happen or damage caused just because of storing paper.
“I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue the point that keeping the paper in the upper sections of the building is not good,” continued Calhoun. “They’re not retrievable, they’re not accessible and they’re at danger for physical storage.”
Calhoun presented a proposal to the Clinton County Council that they can digitize the papers that they absolutely have to save, and put the papers in a nice, safe place from most of the elements. Calhoun added this can be done in a year.
County Council President Alan Dunn says he thinks this is the right solution.
“We moved forward with a digitization effort to try and take those pieces of paper, run them through a scanner to get them into an electronic format that will allow us to at least dispose of some of those documents,” said Dunn. “We won’t get rid of all 14 million documents we have on the fourth floor.”
There were a couple of other items the council took care of, one involving the Clinton EMS Department, including the much talked about Paramedic Program that is run by Clinton County.
“This new position I think is really over the long term because we are attempting to address a fundamental problem at the source rather than always address the symptoms,” said Dunn. “The problem is there’s a shortage of EMTs and paramedics across the state. So, what we’re trying to do is start our own training program that we open to any in Clinton County and surrounding counties for those who want to be a paramedic.”
That will cost about $65,000.
The council also approved getting some much needed equipment for the County EMS service at a cost of $52,000.
There also exists that county employees will be seeing more in their pay check starting next year.
“June begins the budget process for 2024,” said Dunn. “The council gave guidance for this year to at least advertise a six percent raise for county employees.”
Dunn added they won’t take any action until they have a copy of the full new budget in front of them.