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Lack of Paper Delays Birth Certificates

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United Press International

Parents of newborn babies must wait a while longer for birth certificates because the state has run out of paper on which the documents are printed, officials said.

“We are waiting for the paper to come in,” said Gwen Bach-Stewart, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Hospitals. The state gives free birth certificates to the parents of all newborns.

Bach-Stewart said the problem arose last year when budget cuts forced the Office of Vital Statistics to cut in half its usual paper order. The paper ran out late in 1988, and because of state purchasing procedures the order was delayed.

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“What we plan to do to get caught up is to print 6,000 to 8,000 a week to knock out the backlog,” she said. But the backlog is 35,000 certificates, and requests have been sitting in the vital statistics office for three months.

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