Scanning The Future Processing 65,000 Files Should Take Until 2000

Thanks to $100,000 worth of computer equipment and staff time, a wall of files in the Kootenai County assessor’s office should soon come tumbling down.

Some 65,000 files, dating to 1971, take up the space of a small room in the assessor’s office. Each of those files contains the history of a parcel of land within the county. When appraisers look up property information for people, they wade into those files, rolling one wall of documents out of the way to reach another.

But the mountain of paper likely will disappear by mid-2000.

Despite the tight 1998-1999 budget, commissioners set aside money to convert all those files into computer records by scanning the hard copies.

The eventual goal, said Commissioner Ron Rankin, is for people to be able to retrieve county documents on their own, from public computer terminals and printers located in the county administration building.

“This is to expedite and cut down on the staff time needed,” Rankin said. “We need it in everything. The clerk’s office and the treasurer’s office also are high priorities - anywhere we have a lot of public contact and public records.”

Mike McDowell, senior deputy assessor, said that scanning the documents will save the time of up to two full-time employees in the long term. That staff time will be used to scan and index the documents with the new system, he said.

But operating a paperless office could eventually mean fewer employees, he said.

“Through retirement or attrition, we’d be able to reduce staff size,” McDowell said.

Currently, people requesting information in the assessor’s office have to wait five minutes or less, McDowell said. It’s unclear how long people will have to wait after the information is computerized. That depends, McDowell said, on how many computer stations the office has. Beginning around Jan. 1, the office is scheduled to have two new public access computer terminals installed.

People requesting information pay only for copies. There is no charge to look at the public files.

McDowell estimates that the 65,000 documents will take about 6,000 staff hours to scan. By hiring two temporary clerks to work 1,500 hours each, the assessor’s office can complete half the work. The rest of the work will be done by regular staff and with help from the county’s information services department, McDowell said.

Many other county departments also would like to convert from paper to computer files. Some, including the board of commissioners office and the recorder’s office, already have.

Cheryl Reed, supervisor of the recorder’s office, said putting the documents into the computer probably has saved about 20 staff hours per week.

“We’ve probably saved half a person,” she said. One person used to spend three to four hours per day, she said, filming the documents and making microfiche out of them. The recorder’s system was converted in January.

The imaging process also makes county documents more accessible to the public, said Carrie Cole, the county’s imaging systems manager. The public has access to all scanned documents on two computers in the recorder’s office and two behind the county’s information desk in the lobby. In the past, people had to go to each individual office and request that those documents be pulled by hand.

“The concept there is to have that be one-stop shopping for county information,” McDowell said.