NEWBURYPORT — Upstairs in City Hall, hidden from public view, are stacks of boxes and piles of paper built up over decades.
The documents and files that were once important to the city have now become clutter, Mayor Donna Holaday said.
She has asked department heads to go through the stacks of storage boxes over the next few weeks and mark what needs to stay and what can go.
Certain municipal documents fall under the state's Public Records law and must be kept for a certain length of time. Payroll information must always be kept. The mayor said the city clerk is researching the requirements of the law.
But, the mayor said that from her examinations of the documents, much of it doesn't fall into that category.
"I think a lot of it is clutter," she said.
For instance, she found a handwritten note from decades ago detailing a fund with $317 remaining it in. There was a letter dated in 1946 describing the purchase of an item, the mayor said.
There are stacks of old warrants and city reports, old ledgers and vouchers, and financial reports dating back to fiscal year 1997.
Old ledger books dating back to the 1960s do not have to be kept in City Hall, Holaday said.
"They have no value," she said. "There's no worthwhile information in there at all."
The piles began out of habit, the mayor believes.
Staff would run out of space in their offices and move their unneeded stuff upstairs, she said.
"You just kept adding to the pile rather than decreasing it," Holaday said.
And even when the time period required by state law passed, no one let it go.
City Clerk Rich Jones said yesterday he hasn't closely gone through the piles on the upper floor of City Hall but based on the piles of "cardboard storage boxes of stuff" downstairs in the basement, he expects the upstairs stacks are much of the same.
The boxes downstairs lacked any historical records that cannot be destroyed, he said.
Instead, there were old assessors' records or auditors' records — old bills and financial documents, Jones said.
The city is working to bring in a shredder and recycling machine at the end of August to pitch the unnecessary documents.
Eventually, the mayor hopes to upgrade the city's technology and allow all of the city's warrants to be done electronically and eliminate paper warrants.
"There has to be a better system," Holaday said.
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