Keeping tabs on Priest River history

PRIEST RIVER – Imagine that you had to keep every receipt from every purchase you ever made, as did your family members before you. From seemingly small items like the first treat you bought for yourself as a kid to larger, life-changing items like a home. Also, imagine every decision your family ever made was done by a household vote and records of each election must be kept.

Now, say it’s been almost 90-years, and you have piles of boxes, notebooks and ledgers of your familial and fiscal history. None of it can be thrown away without a review from the rest of the family. You could digitize said records, but the software alone and the hard drives to store them on costs thousands of dollars you don’t have. You don’t have extra money to hire helpers, and volunteers, while well-intentioned, aren’t sure what you are required to keep and what you can throw away, so every piece of paper must pass through your hands anyway.

That’s a very loose allegory of the project facing Priest River City Clerk/Treasurer Laurel Thomas. She’s not complaining though. On the contrary, Thomas, who will have worked with the city 20-years this summer, likes the challenge and the immersion in Priest River’s history.

“I think it’s fascinating,” Thomas says, leafing through a police records notebook from 1938. “If anything, you have to have a lot of focus when you’re down here, because it would be too easy to find yourself just reading.”

Several rooms in Priest River City Hall’s basement are chock full of boxes, ledgers and blueprints that need to be sorted through and catalogued. Thomas has been at for over a year.

According to the Idaho State Legislature Section 50-907, “Permanent records shall be retained by the city in perpetuity or may be transferred to the Idaho state historical society’s permanent records repository upon resolution of the city council. Other documents or records as may be deemed of semipermanent nature by the city council.”

The City of Priest River adopted a records retention schedule in 2007. It separates records into permanent, semipermanent and transitory. Election records are permanent, while things like utility meter books, W-2s are semi-permanent, meaning they can possibly be disposed of after five fiscal years. Vendor lists, which are lists of vendors providing goods and services to the city, are transitory, meaning they are kept until superseded.

Any records proposed for disposal must go through a legal process. Thomas makes a list, sends it to the city attorney Katie Elsaesser, who makes her recommendations to the city council who look at the list during a council meeting and then vote on whether or not to dispose of the records.

“I don’t make that decision,” Thomas clarified. “It’s not legal for me to come down here and just start throwing stuff way.”

Probably the biggest challenge for Thomas, or any clerk in a smaller municipality with limited staff is finding the time to meticulously go through city records. It is not a task that is included in the official duties of clerk/ treasurer.

“Throughout the years employees have tried to brave the dungeon before me,” Thomas said, smiling. “It can be daunting though and it’s time consuming.”

It may seem like an obvious solution to say that the city should just digitize their records, but it’s not that simple, according to Thomas. Some of the city records were lost in a fire in 1929 and others were damaged beyond saving when city hall’s basement flooded in 2009.

“Unfortunately, there’s just no getting those back,” Thomas said.

The computer equipment and software to archive records online can cost thousands of dollars and that still does not negate the legal requirement that the city keep physical copies of certain records for a period of years.

“The Association of Idaho Cities are a good resource to help you figure out how to tackle projects like this, but it just takes time,” Thomas said.

Thomas has slowly, but meticulously been organizing records by creating spreadsheets for each box and marking them by year and what they are, such as elections, council minutes, police records, etc.

“If someone does a public records request, by law we have to respond to that within 3-10 business days,” Thomas said. “In the future, city employees should be able to come down here and all of the records will be in their allotted place, by subject and year, so they don’t have to go searching through random piles.”

Read the full story at The Miner Online.