City Clerk Karen Fanion and her assistant, Donna Roy, sort some of the decaying city records in the clerk’s vault which date back hundreds of years. Funds to preserve the records have been approved by the city’s Community Preservation Commission.(Photo by Carl E. Hartdegen).
WESTFIELD – The Community Preservation Commission unanimously voted Thursday night to approve half of the funding requested by City Clerk Karen Fanion to preserve the city’s records, some of which date back to the founding of Westfield in 1669.
The commission voted to approve the use of $135,902 from the city’s Community Preservation Act account, half of the $271,804 needed to preserve the historical documents and to install environmental control in the vault in the City Clerk’s office.
Fanion has submitted an initial request in August for $120,000, but several CPC members raised concerns about spending money to preserve the documents, then put them back into the damp environmental of the vault where they would begin to deteriorate again.
“These records date back to 1669, the founding of Westfield,” Fanion said at the August meeting. “They include birth, marriage, death and land transaction records. These are permanent records. We can never get rid of them.”
JAY VINSKEY
“We need to have these records so they can be used in the future,” Fanion said. “Some of the books which need to be restored have mold and mildew. These (documents) are very interesting, very valuable to the city.
“There is a lot of water damage. Some have insects in them. They need to be cleaned up and preserved,” Fanion said. “A record of the Old Burying Grounds was stuck between two books. It’s so fragile that we don’t want to touch it until it’s restored.”
Fanion said that part of the project is digitizing the documents for a back-up electronic record, but added that “researchers can find digital records, but often need to confirm that the original document still exists.
“Some of these documents are so bad that they can’t be digitized until they’ve been restored,” Fanion said.
The commission asked Fanion to get a cost estimate for both the records preservation and to install environmental controls in the vault. Fanion submitted the $271,804 cost estimate to the board at its October meeting, which ten lead to members requesting Fanion to investigate other funding sources through grant programs.
Funds have been approved to preserve city records dating back to past centuries which have been deteriorating for decades. (Photo by Carl E. Hartdegen)
“Karen did everything we asked her to do,” CPC Chairman Joe Muto said Friday. “Originally the project did not include the environmental control, so we asked her to investigate that and give us a cost estimate.
“We did that because of concern that preserving the records and then putting them back into the damp, cold vault wouldn’t protect them,” Muto said. “If we ‘re going to protect the records, we wanted to do it right.
“Then we asked her to find alternative funding, which she did when the mayor agreed that he would find funding to cover half of the project cost,” Muto said.
Fanion did research grant programs and found a federal grant, through the National Historical Records Committee, which provides grants to educational institutions and libraries in the state through the state Historic Records Advisory Board. However, that grant program is not available to municipalities for records preservation.
Principal Planner Jay Vinskey, who provides the CPC with administrative support, said the commission’s vote of approval is contingent upon appropriation of the city’s share of the record preservation program funding. Mayor Daniel M. Knapik will have to submit the CPC funding recommendation to the City Council for appropriation.
“The CPC is supportive of this project, but likes the matching funding approach,” Vinskey said. “They don’t like to be funding 100 percent of a project.”
