Meeting of the Board of Regents | March 2010

SUMMARY

Issue for Discussion

The New York State Archives is working with SED’s Office of Operations and Management Services and the Office of General Services to develop plans for an expansion to the current State Records Center on the edge of the State Office Campus. This area is not included in plans for the reuse of the campus, and the expansion of the Records Center will allow the Archives to meet its obligations to store the inactive records of state agencies. The current plan envisions a doubling of available space in the Records Center.

Proposed Handling

The Regents will receive an update on and discuss plans for the Records Center expansion.

Procedural History

The addition to the existing Records Center responds to the fact that a planned expansion of the State Records Center in the Office of Cultural Education’s planned stewardship facility is no longer an option. Given the great need to increase space at the records center, the Office of General Services hired Cannon Design to prepare a preliminary design and estimate of costs for an expansion of the records center. The 2008-09 enacted budget provided $12.6 million to carry out the expansion.  This was reappropriated in the 2009-10 budget, but is not included in the 2010-11 Executive Budget proposal.

Background Information

The State Records Center currently holds over 235,000 cubic feet of records, but it has been at or above capacity for the last several years. In the absence of available space at the records center, some state agencies have been forced to seek alternative records storage space. Their choices are either much higher priced commercial storage or use of their own facilities, which are often already crowded. The planned expansion to the records center, will allow the Archives to guarantee storage space for state agency inactive records for many years and will provide additional necessary space for the storage of archival records that the Archives cannot currently maintain in the Cultural Education Center and that cannot be accommodated in the new facility until a second phase is constructed.

Recommendation

We recommend that the Regents support our efforts to ensure the better management of the state’s records through making increased and reasonably priced storage space available to our state agency customers.  This will require that the funding to construct the Records Center be reinstated in the 2010-11 capital budget.  We further recommend that funding be found immediately to carry out the architectural design phase of the project.

Timetable for Implementation

The 2008-09 capital budget included $12.6 million for the expansion, but the project was never approved to go forward.  At this point, if the architectural plans are completed in the next 6 months, funds reinstated and approval granted for construction, the addition to the records center can be completed by 2012.