11/10/2009 COMMUNITY PRESERVATION ACT COMMITTEE Minutes

Home Browse Search

T011'N 4�. Town of Mashpee Town Clerk r M 16 Great Neck Road North t !" Mashpee MA 02649 Phone#508-539-1400 ext. 534 `n' Fax#508-539-2892 e-mail address TownClerk@ci.mashpee.ma us To: Community Prese ation Act Tee From: Deborah F. Da Town Clerk Date: October 31, 2007 Re: Record Retention/Consolidation Application As you may be aware, a petition article was approved by the voters at the May 3, 2004 Annual Town Meeting requiring all boards and committees to submit both tape recordings and hard copies of their minutes from each and every meeting. While the retention requirements for tapes are only three years, the written copy must be kept as a permanent record. The current vault in Town hall maintains such items as office supplies, vital records, town reports, assessors' records, election ballots and supplies, and minutes, etc. The vault is currently out of room to store any more bound minutes. Consequently, we are storing these minutes in boxes. For every election, we have approximately 10,000 ballots to store prior to the election. To be compliant with the Commonwealth's Retention schedule, we must retain all Town election ballots for thirty days after an election and-all State ballots for twenty-two months after the election. At the end of 2008 we will be storing approximately 30,000 ballots (both used and unused) until 2010. I recently attended a conference sponsored by the Massachusetts Town Clerks' Association where I met someone who had a solution to the Town's ever-expanding problem, it would not only free up incredible amounts of physical space in the vault but also give the Clerk's office an opportunity to make the minutes available on the website. More and more inquiries are being made as to the timeframe when minutes will be available on the website. The solution is a simple one by adding a dedicated stand alone computer, equipped with software and scanner, and networked with the Town, thus making the minutes available on the website, after approval, almost immediate. Because we have so much to scan into the computer, it is important for it to be dedicated to this project only.