By Dave Baumeister
County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – At their Tuesday, April 25, meeting, Minnehaha County Commissioners heard a briefing from Judge Robin Houwman on local happenings and statistics with the court system.
Houwman discussed staffing and facilities in the Second Judicial Circuit, for which she is the presiding judge.
According to figures she presented, there are seven judicial circuits in South Dakota, and the Second Circuit, which is just Minnehaha and Lincoln Counties, is by far the smallest, in terms of area.
However, due to the huge populations in those two counties, the Second Circuit has the largest caseload in the state.
In fact, Houwman said her circuit handled 34% of South Dakota’s caseload in 2022. That left 66% of the cases for the other six districts.
The Second Circuit’s 62,338 cases is followed by the Third Circuit’s 26,812 cases. That circuit is made up of 14 counties, which include the larger municipalities of Brookings, Watertown, Huron, and surrounding areas.
To handle the larger load, Houwman added the Second Circuit currently has 12 circuit judges and four magistrate judges and is in the process of hiring a fifth magistrate judge, after the state legislature granted them the ability to do so during their last session.
In answer to a question from Commissioner Dean Karsky, Houwman said that the state picks up some of the circuit’s expenses, such as judges and staff salaries, but the county is on the hook for other costs, including facilities.
And some of those facilities involve the storage of records.
The Second Judicial Circuit Court Administrator Karl Thoennes told commissioners how state law requires the circuit to keep all records for at least 10 years, but that the major portion of records have to be kept in perpetuity and have been since South Dakota became a state in 1889.
In 2012, the legislature defined that records can be kept digitally, and they have been since that time, but that still left 123 years of paper records needing to be stored.
Thoennes said that current paper records represent “about 10,000 cubic feet…that must be kept permanently.”
To give commissioners a concept of size, he explained that a standard railroad car can hold around 5,000 cubic feet of material, and an 18-wheeler trailer hold approximately 3,000 cubic feet.
Thoennes then voiced the circuit’s current dissatisfaction with the current records storage company.
He said that beginning around 2002, off-site records were stored and archived by Records Keepers in a warehouse “just over the 10th Street bridge.”
He added that Record Keepers did an “excellent job,” and their rate of charging the county $2,200 per month for storage and record retrieval remained stable for “at least a decade.”
But in March 2022, the business was purchased by Vital Record Control, a national record storage and archiving company.
Thoennes explained that their monthly rates have more than doubled since the acquisition a year ago.
In addition, “without prior notice,” VRC moved their storage facilities near the airport.
“Since then, the court has had a great deal of difficulty retrieving records for court cases and the public,” Thoennes wrote, “We sometimes wait weeks or months for records, and VRC often insists that they never received the missing records from Record Keepers.”
The county now budgets $30,000 a year for record storage, but VRC has already increased that annual expenditure to over $55,000, and Thoennes expects those increases to continue.
He also mentioned that this cost is just for Minnehaha County, as Lincoln County has its own expenses for storage.
To deal with this, Thoennes said that the circuit is looking towards digitizing all of the old records to eliminate the need for dealing with companies like VRC to store its material.
The circuit has been working with Sioux Falls company Active Data Systems on a trial basis to scan 176 boxes from Lincoln County damaged, or in danger of being damaged, from flooding, as well as 20 standard storage boxes for Minnehaha County.
Just scanning Lincoln County’s 176 boxes cost $55,000, roughly one year’s rent to VRC.
According to Thoennes, based on the scanning costs for Lincoln County, Minnehaha would be looking at a cost of $312 per standard record box for its 6,600 boxes, or just over $2 million.
But after this is done, the state and Unified Judicial System would then assume all the costs of keeping the digitalized records, absolving the county of any further fees.
No action was taken on this at the meeting, but Thoennes and Houwman did want to put the matter on the county’s “radar” for future budgeting consideration.
The next county commission meeting will be at 9 a.m. May 16 on the third floor of the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota in Sioux Falls.
