Neglected Orange County Archives Seek Respect, a Home

To history buffs, keeping the county’s old records safe in an archive and in the public eye makes sense. But ever since the 1994 bankruptcy, Orange County’s historical treasure trove has been neglected, trapped in a state of political and budgetary limbo.

Barbara Milkovich, a member of the county’s Historical Commission, said she gets frustrated and upset talking about the county’s archive situation.

“I’ve been battling this since [the bankruptcy] and it’s a tragedy. A major tragedy,” said Milkovich. “We have precious records that are not getting proper care, and to make matters worse, we have not collected any new records since 1994, the year of the bankruptcy.”

Seemingly out of sight and out of mind, the archives serve as an eye-brow raising metaphor for the county, Milkovich says: Only Orange County could call itself economically solvent while having an archive without an archivist.

“Consider that it was the nation’s largest [municipal] bankruptcy, yet not one single document has been added to the archives on the bankruptcy,” Milkovich said. “And, some of the documents may already have been lost forever by staff and office managers who have no understanding of what needs to be saved.

“This is the whole bankruptcy and this could be the subject of a major project for study later, to help others learn how it developed,” she said.

Said Marshall Duell, curator of the Old County Courthouse Museum: “It’s probably not the ideal archival facility. But it’s a great improvement over what they had before, which was a single building off Chestnut Street in Santa Ana.”

Old maps, property records and black-and-white photographs depicting the county’s transformation from agricultural center to suburbia are housed in the archives, which seem to be the county’s best-kept secret.

The archives have always been a program attached to this or that department, existing on a shoestring budget and with no major plan or goal.

Established in 1983, the program was administered by the county’s General Services Agency and transferred to the county public library two years later.

From 1986 to 1995, the section enjoyed its longest, most healthy run when it was staffed with two people: an archivist and a technician. The archives were moved into a newly renovated facility in the basement of the Old County Courthouse.

But because of the bankruptcy, the library relinquished control to the county clerk-recorder’s office--after Clerk-Recorder Gary L. Granville stepped forward when no one else would.

“In the first seven weeks of the bankruptcy, the county pulled the people from the archives and they asked me if we could attend to it,” he said. “Of course, we didn’t have the staff or the expertise.”

Operating on the largess of the clerk-recorder’s office, Granville assigned someone to walk over to the courthouse and open the archives for limited hours and by appointment for researchers. Hiring a bona fide archivist was out of the question, he said.

“We’ve never had any budget for it,” Granville said. “I brought it up during budget talks over the last two years. I said put it someplace else. Find another department.”

But his pleas fell on deaf ears. Now the office of protocol--which hosts industry leaders, dignitaries and VIPs, often from other countries--wants to move into the archives’ space.

“There has been a threat to move them, and we fought it long and hard,” said Historical Commission member Esther Cramer, who expressed frustration with what she called the county’s “low priority” on its own history.

“We all understood that when the bankruptcy came, that losing the archivists and limiting its hours were only temporary and the doors would be reopened soon.”

During recent budget talks, commission members like Cramer and Milkovich made the rounds at the county’s administration building, trying to lobby the five county supervisors. “There isn’t anyone we didn’t see,” Milkovich said.

Supervisor Chuck Smith, whose district includes Santa Ana and the old courthouse, says he supports having an archive program but added that the county doesn’t have enough money to jump-start one.

In the meantime, Smith said he favors moving the archives out and allowing the protocol office to move in. Protocol now is in the main lobby of the county Hall of Administration.

“We have put money into the county’s protocol office because they host a lot of visitors interested in foreign trade and investment,” Smith said. “The old courthouse is the ideal place to greet visiting dignitaries, but we have to find a place for the archives.”

Smith hopes that county staff will find a suitable location this year. But he also said there has been some electronic transfer of records to compact discs.

But there is no archivist to monitor which of county’s thousands of documents must be saved.