For Want of a Budget, O.C. Archives Languish

In a cluster of dank, dusty rooms in the basement of the old courthouse in Santa Ana sits Orange County history.

There, some of the county’s earliest documents are bound in oversized ledgers, filed away in acid-free boxes and folders and tucked in drawers.

The county once had an archivist, as well as an assistant, to sort through and preserve the historic documents and help the public in using them.

Today, the archives go largely unattended, another casualty of the county’s historic 1994 bankruptcy.

The two archive staffers were reassigned within the county library system, and the county clerk-recorder’s office handles archive requests on a part-time, as-needed basis. Without proper training or a budget, employees do little more than ensure the security of the documents.

Employees say they have done their best but admit that their rudimentary knowledge of historical preservation is often not enough even to muddle through. Public requests go unfulfilled; unprotected, fragile documents deteriorate; new documents go unsorted, stacked in a nearby room.

Most requests come from a mundane source: companies that write environmental impact reports, needing old aerial photos. Occasionally, a student or historian might be doing research for a paper.

Now, with the county on more secure financial footing, history buffs and scholars are urgently pushing the Board of Supervisors to restore the archives’ budget.

“The archives are one of the critical functions of the county,” said Barbara Milkovich, chairwoman of the Orange County Historical Commission. “We need archives because they retain our sense of the past.”

Current documents hold historical value for the future, she said, and archivists are needed to sort through important records from the bankruptcy--an event of national significance--to determine which should be kept.

But continued budget constraints make additional care for the archives difficult, said Gary L. Granville, the county clerk-recorder. Justifying money for the well-being of piles of paper is difficult when police, fire and other essential services need funding as well, he said.

“The county is sympathetic, but it’s a question of where do you put your dollars,” he said.

The $3.85-billion budget adopted Tuesday ignores the archives again. But supervisors are reviewing a proposal from the county’s former archivist, Gabriele Carey, to evaluate the condition of the archives and determine what needs to be done for them.

A tour of the archives offers a glimpse of why history aficionados are so passionate about the collection:

Lining the shelves in one tiny room are volume after volume of handwritten minutes of Board of Supervisors’ meetings dating back to 1889.

In elegant penmanship, the first entry in Volume 1 is dated Aug. 5, 1889, a scant four days after the county was officially established: “The Supervisors elected under the provisions of the said act met in the hall over Beatty Bra’s store at 10 o’clock A.M. There were present: W.H. Spurgeon of the 1st District, Jacob Ross of the 2nd District, S. Littlefield of the 3rd District, S. Armor of the 4th District and A. Gary Smith of the 5th District.”

Among the first actions ever taken by the board, according to the fading scrawl, was authorization for the supervisors to purchase office supplies.

Tucked in a drawer nearby, protected by a zippered case, is a torch from the 1984 Olympic Games, carried by Harriett M. Wieder, the county’s first female supervisor, as she ran through Santa Ana.

The Board of Supervisors, urged by members of the Historical Commission, first established the archives in 1984.

The county hired Carey, a professional archivist and records historian, to run the archives. She scoured dozens of departments and offices for old materials, then carefully culled them. After picking out the historically important ones, she cataloged them and discarded the rest.

But the scope of the archives today does not do justice to the county’s history, said Carey, now with a private historical records company in Brea. The majority of documents were simply thrown out over the years by employees looking to save space.

The archives, which began in a warehouse on Chestnut Street in Santa Ana, moved into the old courthouse during the early 1990s.

Since the clerk-recorder’s staff took over from the professional staff, with nothing more than a quick rundown of the location of major collections and a few tips on environmental controls, they have managed to avert any major disasters.

But there have been slip-ups along the way.

The staff, for instance, didn’t know during its first several months on the job that hundreds of the most frequently viewed aerial photos are delicate items that deteriorate if left in the light for extended periods.

They also didn’t know, until a visiting archivist pointed it out, that they shouldn’t allow patrons to put sticky notes on the maps because they leave behind a residue that collects dust and dirt.

On behalf of the generations to come, the county can ill afford to operate its archives haphazardly, historians said.

Historical documents need constant monitoring, they said. The archive staff, for example, used to check the humidity and temperature gauges three times a day, five days a week, Carey said.

Now, Carey would like nothing better than to return to her roots in the county to restore the very collection she began more than 15 years ago.

“Those records are the institutional memory of the county,” Carey said. “If those records are lost, the county in a sense acquires documentary amnesia. It loses its past.”