The transfer of Luzerne County government records into a new storage building is tentatively scheduled for the end of March, according to county engineer Lawrence Plesh.
The county purchased a former U.S. mail carrier facility at 85 Young St. in Hanover Township a year ago for $750,000 because its leased space in the Thomas C. Thomas building on Union Street in Wilkes-Barre was deemed insufficient for record storage.
A state archives expert advised county officials years ago to move records out of the Thomas C. Thomas property due to its temperature extremes, lack of security, leaks and fire hazards. State law requires the retention of many of these records, including original documents dating back to the late 1800s.
The council earmarked $1.45 million in past-borrowed funds for the new building purchase and renovation.
A portion of the new building also will house the county coroner’s office, which is currently in the county’s Penn Place building in downtown Wilkes-Barre, and a new morgue. The addition of a morgue would end the county’s reliance on Wilkes-Barre General Hospital to store bodies that can’t be transported to a funeral home due to pending investigations or delays in identifying the deceased and notifying survivors, officials said.
The morgue and coroner’s office should be ready by the end of April, Plesh said.
Mountain Top resident Edward Kovalski was hired earlier this month to fill a new county records manager position paying a $47,500 salary, officials said.
The administration said a manager is needed to catalogue records, set up the new facility and a filing system, and oversee the movement of records.
Kovalski, 61, has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from King’s College and worked at PPL Susquehanna LLC in Berwick from 1979 until he accepted an early retirement in July 2010.
He said he held positions overseeing records and document control for 25 years of his tenure at PPL.
“The nuclear industry is very regimented, and I want to develop some of the same processes for record accountability in the county,” Kovalski said.
Kovalski said he was “bored stiff” in retirement and recently completed a 15-month project for a Pittsburgh-area based nuclear staffing agency indexing, scanning and purging thousands of boxes of records for Southern California Edison’s decommissioning of a power plant.
All county departments with records that must be stored have worked with the county solicitor’s office to identify which documents must be preserved or destroyed, said county Judicial Services and Records Division Head Joan Hoggarth .
Each box of records will be labeled with a unique number, and the contents will be inventoried in a computerized database set up by Kovalski, Hoggarth said.
Kovalski also is keeping a schedule on when some stored records can be shredded, she said.
A fee on recorded deeds that generates approximately $7,000 per month is expected to cover utility costs and some other operational expenses for the new facility, the administration has said.
