COUNTY REPLACING PAPERWORK WITH COMPUTER DISKS

If all goes according to plan, by the end of next year most of Cape Girardeau County's official paperwork will be shredded.

There's no cover-up, corruption or scandal. The official documents and other county paperwork are simply being transferred to computer disk.

Gerald Jones, presiding commissioner of the Cape Girardeau County Commission, said the documents are being put on disk simply to save space.

In some cases up to 5,000 pages a day are finding their way to various rooms in the county courthouse and administration building, where they've been stacking up for years.

Jones said something had to be done.

"We needed the space. We were literally to the point of having to dispose of them or build a new building to store them," he said. "We've thrown away everything we can and still have one room stacked to the ceiling with papers."

An optical scanner purchased by the recorder's office is being used to put the paperwork on disk.

Recorder Janet Robert did all the investigating into the benefits of scanning in the paperwork. Her office was the first to have its documents placed on disk.

"For me, it was a space saver and (meant) more instant retrieval of a document," she said.

She has files on disk from January 1995 to the present and plans to go back further.

The offices of the county collector, auditor and assessor also have had their documents placed on disk with several offices to go.

The cost of transferring all the office's documents to disk will cost taxpayers an estimated $300,000, Robert said.

The prosecuting attorney's office isn't scheduled to get the optical scanner until later this year, but Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle is ready now.

"The sooner the better," he said. "It will definitely help alleviate our problem with space."

Swingle said his office has special problems because he is required by law to save certain hard-copy documents for extended periods of time.

For example, paperwork on a case involving a murder never can be thrown away. Other documents involving felonies have to be held for 25 to 50 years.

Swingle said that will change when Cape Girardeau County goes from a second-class county to a first-class county at the first of the year.

"Class-1 counties can save all of their paperwork on computer," he said.

But he won't shred all of his documents immediately.

"I'm a little leery," he said. "I won't do that until I'm confident there's a specific procedure and some sort of backup."

Charles Hutson, the circuit clerk, is a bit leery, too.

"The life storage of one of those disks is 10 to 20 years," he said. "That's why the state court's administrator's office is reluctant to do this."

Hutson's office is run by the state rather than the county.

He says that he, too, has limited space but would hate to get rid of his paper records.

"I won't be scanning in any of the paperwork until it gets approved by the Missouri Supreme Court and the state court's administration," he said.

Robert says the county hopes to avoid this problem by transferring disks to new disks every 10 years, reducing the risk.