For the record
Amy O’Brien spruces up boxes slated for storage as permanent records. Photo by Bill Coates

The state’s collective memory is stored in 240,000 boxes, give or take a few. Most of them are housed in a gray block of a building on Jefferson Street and 19th Avenue.
Laurie Sletten makes sure each box is in its proper place. And that each box can be retrieved, when a request for it comes down from the state agency that stuffed it with documents in the first place.
Given all the boxes, these documents easily run into the millions. To the cynical, they are the mind-numbing end product of the bureaucratic assembly line. To Sletten, however, they are public records, the hardcopy of the people’s business.
Sletten is director of the state Records Management Division, part of the Arizona State Library Archives and Public Records.
Visitors to her building do not forget where they are.
Boxes are stacked in the reception area. Boxes are stacked in conference rooms. Boxes are stacked in the hallways.
“I started in January 2004. I found that we were full in August 2004,” Sletten says.
3 buildings handle overflow
Records Management has leased three satellite buildings to handle the overflow.
The boxes end up here, because they must. State agencies are required to store their records with — no surprise — Records Management. A few, though, are exempted. The Department of Public Safety, for one, keeps its own records.
The Department of Economic Security stores some of its own records.
But space there is limited, so many boxes from DES end up with Records Management anyway. Perhaps they are among the dozens of boxes stacked in the hallway. Perhaps, like most records, they have found their way to an adjoining warehouse. Here, boxes fill shelf after shelf. And shelves take up the kind of space usually reserved for airplane hangers.
Haunted warehouse
Another attached warehouse has yet more boxes. Lore has it that it’s haunted.
For this tale, Sletten defers to Bill James, the division’s preservation imaging manager. He transfers paper documents onto microfilm. Among the warehouse’s many boxes, he says, one once contained a murder weapon — a woman’s shoe.
“We had some evidence that a woman had killed somebody with the heel of her shoe,” James says.
People have reported sensing a presence and hearing noises, James says. Most likely, he adds, it was just the warehouse creaking from settling.
Haunted or not, if a warehouse has a record an agency wants, somebody from Records Management has to fetch it. There’s protocol to be followed.
It starts with an agency request. That generates a work order that’s downloaded from a computer to a handheld scanner. All the boxes are cataloged by location, so a warehouse worker has a good idea where to look.
The scanner reads a barcode to pinpoint the right box.
Just how the papers (or other records) ended up here in the first place is also a matter of protocol. Not every piece of paper produced by a government worker becomes a public record. A photocopy of published material, like a page from an encyclopedia for example, is not a public record.
And while most records, by law, should be available to the public, some are exempt. Privacy is one concern. So birth and death certificates and medical records are off-limits.
And not every record is permanent.
“Some of these records might only be kept three years,” Sletten says.
If it were otherwise, the state would end up buried in avalanche of paper.
Protocol for keeping records
But destroying a public record is not simple. State agencies — which have legal custody of their records wherever they are stored — can’t just haul them off to be shredded or recycled. They must follow requirements on what records are worth keeping. This is called records retention.
It sounds complicated and it is, at least at the federal level.
“There was a quote in a book that I read that there are over 17,000 federal requirements for the retention of records,” Sletten says.
In Arizona, the retention requirements don’t just apply to state agencies, Sletten says. They go for every political subdivision — all the way down to a one-room school district.
Records Management consultants assist with records keeping throughout the state.
Among other things, an agency must keep records needed to do its business. If it publishes an annual report, it might just want to hold on to a year’s worth of monthly reports, Sletten says.
Records are kept for financial reasons. Federal auditors will want to see how the state spent its money on things like freeway construction.
Then there might be a legal need for a record. Here’s the extreme example: a lawsuit initiated by the Arizona attorney general on prescription-drug pricing prevented disposal of some 32,000 boxes from more than a dozen state agencies. They had been held as possible evidence, though many have been now released, Sletten says.
Last, there’s history to be considered. If a document is deemed historic and significant, it could acquire a whole new status. In time, could become part of the state archive collection.
Fragile archives are stored in a vault the size of a basketball half-court. The room takes up a corner of the Records Management building.
James provides a quick tour.
Constitution, Mecham video
He brings out an original draft of the Arizona Constitution. A product of its era, it’s typewritten. A constitution written today would probably be preserved on a flash-drive. Another shelf has endless hours of video on the impeachment trial of Evan Mecham.
Many archives are on microfilm.
“We have approximately 80,000 rolls of film,” James says.
While microfilm is a step removed from the original document, it has the advantage of longevity, Sletten says. Paper made with acid will break down in time. Microfilm is made to last 500 years.
The archives and other permanent records will likely get a new home next June. That’s when the new Polly Rosenbaum Archives and History Building is expected to be completed. It will be just south of Records Management.
Meanwhile the business of government grinds on, creating records in ever more high-tech fashion. And just like paper, electronic records are public records, including e-mail.
Not all government-employee e-mails, Sletten says, are a matter of record. If somebody’s telling their spouse to pick up some milk on the way home, it’s not.
But when La Paz County Attorney Martin Brannan recently sent an e-mail to Rep. Trish Groe, R-3, asking to talk about pending legislation, well, that was a public record. Unfortunately for the sender, the e-mail appeared ill-advised, as — days before — Groe was arrested for drunk driving in Brannan’s jurisdiction.
The Arizona Republic acquired the e-mail through a public-records request.
Perhaps next time Brannan might consult a chart that Records Management staffers use in training sessions. It’s titled: “Is It A Record?”