Houston seeks help saving historic city documents

HOUSTON — Sonya Dukes dashes back to her office, while her volunteer helper flips through pages of documents in the city council chambers.

Dukes quickly returns with a water-damaged green binder, which she opens to reveal a piece of paper lined with neat handwriting. It’s ordinance No. 2 from the city of Houston, written nearly five decades ago.

“This is what we’re trying to protect,” she said, before joking that she’s “still looking for ordinance 1.”

Founded in 1966, Houston is actually older than the city of Wasilla, which was incorporated in 1974. Dukes said the binder was wedged in amidst records from the city’s entire 47-year history. They are kept in 300 boxes in a basement room that has flooded twice in Dukes’ tenure. Protecting those records is part of her job.

But it’s not an easy task. Even with help from a group of high school kids immediately after the flood and the ongoing aid of her volunteer, Doris Anderson, Dukes said she still needs to find the funding to bring in a professional service to scan documents and store those scanned copies off-site.

And it’s not just something she does out of a sense of duty to the city’s history, though, like most clerks, she does feel that duty.

“Legally, every city’s supposed to have a records retention schedule, which we do now, but it’s the first one ever,” Dukes said.

But records retention occupies a weird spot. It’s not a high priority like roads and public safety. It can be hard to find the money to pay for it.

And it’s hard in a place like Houston where budgets are tiny. A $19,000 appropriation like the one the city sought for the retention program is a drop in the bucket to a place like the Mat-Su Borough, but it’s a huge chunk of Houston’s budget. On the other hand, a $19,000 appropriation might even run the risk of going overlooked and left out of something like the state capital budget, which deals with appropriations usually in the $1 million-and-up range.

“Small communities — we’re stuck in the middle,” she said.

But she said she has the support of her city council, which put that $19,000 request at the top of its list of items sought in the next state budget.

As for Anderson, she said she’s a relatively recent retiree. She had been an accountant for NANA.

“When I first retired I thought it would be fun not doing anything. I was totally wrong,” she said.

Once she’d driven herself sufficiently stir crazy in the home on the Little Sustina River she shares with her husband, she started looking for volunteer opportunities. That led her to the city.

“I jumped all over that,” Dukes said.

For Anderson, she said it’s been fun getting to know the history of the city she lives in through its documents.

She said she loves the idea that she can give back to the local community. The same floods a little over a year ago that inundated the records room surrounded her home.

“The community would stop by to see if we were OK,” she said.

Dukes said she remembers those floods as well.

“Public works had said, ‘hey, the records room flooded,’ and I said, ‘ha ha, that’s so funny,’” Dukes recalls.

A lot of the boxes were stored on the floor and had to be gone through page-by-page and dried out. The next step is to see what should be kept and what doesn’t. That’s what Anderson is up to. Dukes said they found a whole box full of outgoing faxes that all went in the trash. But they still had to sift through each page, making sure records that need to be retained weren’t stuffed in between.

Dukes said that in talking to other clerks from other communities, remote communities with fewer resources, less space and more history and thus more records to retain, she realizes she’s lucky.

But maybe if she gets the word out about how tough it is for her other communities can also look for help.

“I want the awareness out there that there is a big need in all communities,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.