Letter: Who will fund the move to digital records?
A reader wants to know whether state and local governments will have to foot the bill to move to digital records.
Regarding "Sprehe: Keeping it digital": As you state, the bill is a good start to move records from paper to digital form. What concerns me is the widespread effect it will have on state and local governments with regard to cost.
Storing records on a static media such as CD, DVD, etc is certainly cheaper than paper storage. The problem comes when you want immediate access thereby requiring these digital records to be stored on a file server somewhere. Those cost savings are quickly negated by the overhead of such storage.
My point is that aside from the flaws you mentioned in the bill I don't see a funding mechanism to pay for it. Legislation enacted at the federal level has a trickle-down effect and will surely be acted upon at our state level forcing cities such as ourselves to find yet more money in the well to pay for somebody else’s brilliant idea. We are getting pretty tired of unfunded mandates and so are our citizens.
Scott Gutauckis
City of Holly Hill
What do you think? Paste a comment in the box below (registration required), or send your comment to letters@fcw.com (subject line: Blog comment) and we'll post it.
Storing records on a static media such as CD, DVD, etc is certainly cheaper than paper storage. The problem comes when you want immediate access thereby requiring these digital records to be stored on a file server somewhere. Those cost savings are quickly negated by the overhead of such storage.
My point is that aside from the flaws you mentioned in the bill I don't see a funding mechanism to pay for it. Legislation enacted at the federal level has a trickle-down effect and will surely be acted upon at our state level forcing cities such as ourselves to find yet more money in the well to pay for somebody else’s brilliant idea. We are getting pretty tired of unfunded mandates and so are our citizens.
Scott Gutauckis
City of Holly Hill
What do you think? Paste a comment in the box below (registration required), or send your comment to letters@fcw.com (subject line: Blog comment) and we'll post it.