Minnehaha County could spend millions to digitize 120 years of court records — here's why

What should Minnehaha County do with the thousands of boxes of records state law requires them to keep? That's the $2 million question that was posed to the county commission Tuesday morning.

It's a discussion county officials should have during the next several months, especially as physical storage of the records has become more and more expensive, said Minnehaha County Circuit Court Administrator Karl Thoennes.

The state's courts must keep all their records for a period of time, and while a traffic ticket or small claims judgment can be destroyed after a few years, some records regarding documents about divorces, adoptions or felonies must be retained permanently.

Since 2012, the Unified Judicial System's electronic case management system has removed the need for almost all paper records.

But between that time and when South Dakota gained statehood in 1889, Minnehaha County accumulated 10,000 cubic feet of paper records — an amount that could fill two railroad boxcars — that must be kept. About 20% of them are either kept in the county courthouse, the Public Safety Building or the judges' parking garage.

But since 2002, the remaining 8,000 cubic feet of paper records have been stored at Records Keepers, a warehouse near downtown Sioux Falls, which did an "excellent job" at indexing and retrieving the material for a monthly fee of about $2,200, according to written comments by Thoennes.

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But early last year, the company was purchased by a national company called Vital Records Control, for which the reviews are less glowing.

"Without prior notice to the court, VRC moved all court records to a building near the airport," Thoennes wrote. "Since then, the court has had great difficulty retrieving records for court cases and the public. We sometimes wait weeks or months for records, and VRC often insists that they never received the missing records from Records Keepers. The difficulties continue."

In addition, monthly costs have doubled. Thoennes wrote that the March 2023 bill was $4,606. That puts the annual expense well over the $30,000 annual budget for off-site storage of court records, and the county expects the price to keep going up.

Thoennes recommended two options in response to the problems: move the records somewhere else or begin digitizing them.

Scanning the documents to preserve them electronically is attractive for a number of reasons, Thoennes told the commission. For one, it would mean the physical records could be destroyed, removing the need to store them. Additionally, once the records are part of the electronic case management system, UJS then bears both the responsibility and cost for their upkeep.

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Thoennes added in an interview, "it'd be so much faster for the public" to be able to visit the courthouse and access a file electronically than waiting days or weeks to see the physical one.

But saving money in the long run could have a significant cost up front, Thoennes said. A Sioux Falls-based company called Active Data Systems scanned 20 boxes worth of files as a trial run last year, at about $300 per box. Multiply that by 6,600 boxes of records and you're looking at a cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million.

Thoennes wrote if funding was approved, "the Court would be happy to work closely with the County to help draft an RFP for this major scanning project."

Commissioners had few comments on the discussion, although Commissioner Dean Karksy did ask Thoennes about the accuracy and potential deterioration of the electronic data.

Thoennes said a sample of the scanned files would be tested by the clerk of courts' office, along with approval by UJS and the state archivist before it was moved to the state's servers, and that regular backups of the data would be made.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Minnehaha County considers $2 million price tag to digitize a century of court records