Protecting our historic documents

As the lead story in this issue’s News section (“Butte County’s buried treasure”) indicates, the county is not doing a good job of taking care of our historic documents. Valuable records—old maps, newspapers, chattel mortgages and deeds, etc.—dating back 159 years, to 1850, are scattered among several different storage sites in Oroville, including the basement of the Veterans Hall. Most of the sites lack climate control, which means the records are starting to deteriorate or are in danger of doing so, and are inaccessible to the public.

Granted, at a time when the national economy is in the tank and the county is trying to cut $18 million from its budget, historic documents aren’t exactly the highest priority, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start doing something to protect them.

The Board of Supervisors took a first step in that direction recently, when it voted to add a policy to the general-plan update calling for the preservation of historic documents.

More good news is that County Clerk Candace Grubbs, who for 15 years has been trying to get the county to invest in a hall of records, has accumulated more than $2 million in restricted funds that can be used only for digitizing records and modernizing their storage. This is not sufficient to build a new facility, of course, but it potentially could be used to leverage grants and other sources of support.

What’s needed now is for the supervisors to really get behind Grubbs by making a full commitment to a hall of records and beginning the discussion of just what kind of facility that might be. With that wind at her back, she would be in a much better position to seek out other sources of funding, including federal economic-stimulus monies.

There is no reason to wait. This is a long-term project, one whose major costs will come due long after the current recession has passed, but it needs to get started now.