Marion County clerk of courts working to preserve damaged documents

Marion County Clerk of Courts Jessica Wallace and her staff are working to ensure that documents damaged in the recent flooding at the county courthouse are restored and preserved.

The courthouse was closed Dec. 28 through Jan. 2 as clean up in the wake of the flooding was conducted. The courthouse reopened on Jan. 3 with industrial drying units, dehumidifiers, and air purifiers in place. Maintenance crews from the county and Shambaugh Cleaning and Restoration in Ontario were called upon to conduct the necessary clean up in the building. Some of the affected rooms had as much as two inches of standing water in them.

Boxes of documents that were stored in rooms on the west side of the courthouse were soaked when a water pipe located between the third and fourth floors and eight air conditioning units burst due to the extreme cold that socked the region over the Christmas holiday. Water then cascaded down from the upper floors to the second floor storage area where the documents are located, Wallace said.

"We had two rooms of records affected," Wallace said. "In one room we were able to quickly remove those files as the leak was actively dripping. It was all hands on deck. We had probation officers and IT was here to assess the situation and lent a hand. Fortunately, in that room, the leak was contained to one area and only affected some of the boxes. And the boxes themselves protected the records.

"However, that entire room will have to be renovated. In the meantime, we've transferred those records to Document Service Company in Lima. They have a lot contracts with county governments as well as healthcare facilities. They have the knowledge about safe document storage and their facilities are secure and designed to preserve documents."

In a stroke of outrageous fortune, a steel cabinet possibly dating back to the late 19th or early 20th century fully protected all of the documents located inside of it, Wallace said. No moisture whatsoever seeped into that cabinet.

Wallace noted that about 100 boxes of records in another storage room were almost completely doused with water when the pipe burst last week. That room is located on the northwest side of the courthouse facing the parking lot. She said the records stored there will need to restored.

"We're in the process of going through those documents to determine what needs to be treated for mold and restored," Wallace said. "They were scheduled to be picked up on Wednesday to go to a specialty company (BMS CAT of Ohio LLC) that does that type of work."

Wallace said finding a company that could provide service on short notice was difficult due to the incident occurring during the Christmas holiday season and because many other local and state government buildings experienced similar issues due to the weather, including the Ohio Statehouse.

"There's only a handful of companies that provide this kind of service, so getting in contact with them and getting on their schedule was difficult," she said. "Because I want it done now, but it's been challenging, both for those of us who need that service and for the companies that do that type of work. But we're glad we're getting it addressed soon enough to save those documents."

On Thursday, the Marion County Board of Commissioners approved two separate contracts related to document restoration and storage. The commissioners approved an agreement with BMS CAT of Ohio LLC to provide document restoration services for the clerk of courts at a cost not to exceed $18,086.

Commissioners also approved an agreement with Lane's Warehousing, Inc. to provide records storage services for the clerk of courts office at a cost not to exceed $25,000 per calendar year. Lane's Warehousing is affiliated with Document Service Company.

Wallace said the plan now is to permanently store physical records at Document Service Company since it specializes in storage and preservation. The company also provides digitization and disposal services for documents that no longer need to be physically retained. The State of Ohio has outlined protocols for document retention, she said.

Prior to Wallace being elected clerk of courts in 2020, the records retention schedule for the office had not been updated or revised since 1997. Subsequently, there were loads of boxes just laying around with documents that had not been digitized. She and her staff have worked since then to rectify the problem, securing those documents, and scanning them into the court's digital archive.

"We can no longer hold records in this space. It's just not built for that," Wallace said. "So we will begin moving forward now with the plan that we've developed to digitize those documents and then store the records we need to retain (at Document Service Company)."

Wallace noted that since she assumed office in 2021, all documents that have come through the office have been digitized and are now in the computer archive. She said older documents and records are stored on microfilm.

Email: ecarter@gannett.com | Twitter: @AndrewACCarter

This article originally appeared on Marion Star: Marion County clerk of courts working to preserve damaged documents