Off Site Storage
State Records Center
The Records Center provides state agencies with a storage solution for inactive records. Services include pick-up, delivery, and destruction of records. All records remain in the legal custody of the transferring agency and access to stored documents is restricted to the agency's authorized personnel. The transferring of inactive files to the Records Center allows agencies to free up office space and equipment. There is no cost to state agencies for these services. Estimated costs for storing one cubic foot of records in a standard 4-drawer letter size file cabinet in an office environment is $16.29. Conversely, record storage in the state records center costs approximately $1.11 per cubic foot. That is an average savings of $15.18 per box per year. Thus, Missouri taxpayers realized savings of $3,758,634.79 in records storage during FY03. Additionally, environmental resources were saved when more than 16,400 cubic feet of paper documents, having met their record retention requirements, were sent to a commercial recycling facility. This represents the recycling of 246 tons of paper.
The State Records Center is housed in two facilities. The combined storage capacity for the James C. Kirkpatrick State Information Center and two leased Annex facility is 269,000 cubic feet. By the end of FY03, the
State Records Center held 247,633 cubic feet of state agency records. To illustrate this volume, if you were to place each box next to another, they would stretch over 40 miles. Records Management estimates that the
net volume of records will grow at a rate of 12,000 cubic feet in FY04. The growing use of electronic records strategies and the continued destruction of obsolete records will not alleviate the need for more storage
space. If records volumes continue to escalate at a rate of more than 5 percent per year the Division
estimates by 2010, we will need more than 350,000 cubic feet of storage space. Without additional space, we will only be able to accept new records 
as space becomes available through the recycling of obsolete
records. Should this occur, agencies will have to keep their records on-site or invest in commercial records storage.
The Secretary of State's Office has developed options to avert this crisis. Annex 2 was opened in FY02. With additional shelving the capacity of the State Records Center will be 326,000 cubic feet. This shelving will provide a bridge from the existing facilities to a proposed Records Center Campus. A campus approach will provide adequate space and facilities for expansion over time.