Windermere Council makes strides to move into the digital age

The Town Council has authorized the purchase of a software contract with Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. for $50,000.

Council members put out a bid to attract the company with the best features and highest value, and Konica Minolta fit the town’s needs. The company will digitize a portion of Windermere’s public records — as much as $13,000 can afford.

The bulk of the $50,000 allotted to the project is just for the software contract with Konica Minolta, which costs $37,000. The remaining $13,000 is for scanning costs.

The council’s objective is to create an electronic database of all the documents since 1925, when Windermere was incorporated and became an official government body. However, this goal will take quite some time to complete.

“I have seen, quite frankly, some of these papers, and back then — remember — it was on old typewriter, and the paper was almost like tissue paper,” said Windermere Mayor Gary Bruhn.

All the documents currently are stored as hard copies in boxes scattered both in buildings within Windermere and in offsite facilities under the care of Iron Mountain, a company that specializes in documentation storage. Given the scanning costs, the problem the council faced was one of a significant unknown variable: How many pages do they have in total?

“I don’t like going into something and not knowing what the total cost is going to be, but we can’t (know the total cost) because we don’t know how many documents we have,” Bruhn said.

Given the unfathomable amount of pages the documents 

total, the council has no idea how much it will cost to digitize all the documents since 1925, which caused some reluctance when deciding how much money to allot for the scanning costs.

With Konica Minolta, the price to scan a single 8.5-inch-by-11-inch page is 13 cents but can cost up to $1.38 for larger documents such as blueprints. Because of the unknown number of pages contained in storage, the commissioners decided to allocate $13,000 for scanning costs at 13 cents per page.

“The question was: Well, how many pages are there? But we don’t know, I mean, there’s so many. It’s just in boxes,” Bruhn said. “So, my thought was, we go ahead and do the $13,000 worth of scanning, and when we get to that point, (Konica Minolta) can tell (the council) whether that’s 25% (or) 50% of it, and that’s where we’ll go from there. ... So that’s what we’re doing. We’ll take a chip out of it and then see where we’re at.”

With the hope that the $13,000 price tag will allow for a high percentage of scanned documents, council members will evaluate how much more money they’re willing to spend during this budget cycle after Konica Minolta reaches the price quota.

If the project is fully completed, it will allow individuals access to  the recorded minutes and documents from previous decades without having to file a records request. An additional bonus, as Councilman Jim O’Brien pointed out during the meeting, is that going electronic could save the town from lawsuits related to public-records requests.

“With this new software contract, people will be able to find any public-record document using the search tool,” Bruhn said. “For example, somebody will sometimes ask for documents from January 1, 2012, through January 15, 2014, that were addressed to Gary Bruhn. Now you can set those parameters once it’s scanned, and do a simple search instead of having to manually go through all these boxes and papers, greatly saving money and time.”

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Contact Gabby Baquero at [email protected].