Last year, the Albuquerque City Clerk’s Office digitized over a million public records in order to make them more accessible to citizens who file Inspection of Public Records Act requests, as well as city departments that need access to records. And they’re still going.

“Currently we have 9,000 boxes and we also have 58 pallets of large format plans. Each pallet has 12 boxes, so there’s probably millions of records in here,” City Clerk Ethan Watson told City Desk ABQ ahead of the Professional Municipal Clerks Week this week.

Watson said so far this year his office has digitized 550,000 documents. This entails scanning paper documents and uploading them to a digital database. Many of the records are rolled up, so before employees can scan them, they flatten them out with large bricks. 

“The amount of records we scan in a given year depends really on what the records are. Like last year we scanned a million records in part because we were scanning all the city’s HR files and those are big files,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of data entry because you just have to enter the name and the employee ID.”

The records are housed in a warehouse on Menaul Boulevard.

There are rows of shelves and pallets stacked with boxes, 450 reels containing over a million police reports, upwards of 400,000 police fingerprint cards on paper and a climate-controlled room filled with microfilm dating back to the 1940s.

And it all needs to be modernized. 

“It’s a big project,” Watson said. 

Public records requests increased during the pandemic 

Watson was confirmed as city clerk in March 2020 on the same night the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the city and people began mostly working from home. 

That meant city employees had to access records remotely — such as employee files. The pandemic highlighted the need to digitize records such as these. 

“All of a sudden all the paper records that we deal with, we needed to focus on ways to make them more accessible. So ironically, I think the pandemic highlighted the importance of the work of clerk’s offices,” he said. 

Watson said the clerk’s office had already started digitizing and modernizing the city’s records before the pandemic, but since then they’ve increased their efforts by identifying paper records that people routinely use — such as public safety records  — and digitizing them.

“We continue to do this. We work with all departments to kind of see what records they have, what they’re using all the time, and if it’s paper we’ll try and scan it for them so that they can access it remotely,” he said. 

During the pandemic, Watson said, the number of records requests went through the roof, and hasn’t slowed down, with the majority of requests being from the planning department, the police department and the fire department. 

At the warehouse, there are seven full-time employees and about eight temps who are working on digitizing and modernizing the city’s paper records. There are also 13 full-time employees and 20 temporary employees working on fulfilling records requests, but that number fluctuates depending on turnover. 

‘It’s challenging in a way I’m not sure the public entirely understands’ 

Watson said the City Clerk’s Office is one of the oldest municipal positions in the United States, dating back to the Revolutionary War and serving historically as the city’s keeper of records. 

“That role is very important. We have to make sure that the city has the business documents that it needs to do its business and then another part of our role is making those records accessible to the public,” he said. 

Watson also said it’s also about protecting people’s privacy, by redacting personal information and identifiers from the records before they’re released. 

“We actually have the biggest public records team of anyone, (in New Mexico), and our role in making records available to people is very exciting,” he said. “At the same time, it is just very challenging in a way that I’m not sure the public entirely understands.”

Watson said records management is becoming increasingly complicated. 

“I think there could be more support statewide for process management in the area of IPRA and request management,” he said. “I think those are extremely complicated topics and there are offices in other states that really do provide a lot of support to entities in terms of how to process reports.”

During the last fiscal year, the City of Albuquerque dolled out $1.4 million in IPRA-related settlements. Watson said the number of requests that led to settlements was less than 1% of all requests made during that time period. 

In Hawaii, Watson said there’s an office called the Office of Information Practices, that helps entities process requests better. The agency’s website has training tools and guides for the public regarding public records and sunshine laws. 

“I think if we had something like that here it would be phenomenal,” he said.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the types of records that people typically use.