Hopefully, Rickhoff has a strong heart; from the tone of his voice, he sounds just as upset as Enriquez.
"I would much prefer to have this arbitrated peaceably, but I wasn't getting any response, and I felt I had to pursue this," says Rickhoff, who hired a private attorney to sue his elected colleagues.
If there's one place that needs more money for records preservation, it's Bexar, which has some of the oldest records in the state. Rickhoff says he's got 100,000 books that need to be rebound, and countless other records, some of which date back to 1699 and are in Spanish. Trying to restore them, Rickhoff says, is like trying to make a copy of the Declaration of Independence.
"I don't want to take money from anyone that I don't absolutely need," Rickhoff says of the legislation. "But in Bexar County, I don't think $50 would be too high. Right now, if we can get $10 and we can get the costs down to rebind these books, then maybe we can get started."
Rickhoff obviously supports the idea of raising filing fees, but he says the legislation won't do any good unless the language is tightened so that county commissioners can't get their hands on the extra money.
The specific part of Lucio's bill to which Rickhoff is referring is an awkwardly worded paragraph that appears to give county commissioners the ability to make a "written finding" that the preservation funds are needed elsewhere.
Or at least that's how DeBeauvoir and the clerks' association interprets it.
"In other words, [commissioners can] write themselves a note and take all the money," DeBeauvoir says.
Oates says he is surprised that the association is still in a tizzy. Since his bill is now permissive, he thinks DeBeauvoir and her people should buzz off and let county clerks decide whether they want to increase their fees.
"I don't understand why anybody would have a problem with it [the bill]," Oates says. "If someone says the five dollars is enough, then that's fine, they don't have to do anything. They [the association] need to leave the other courthouses the discretion to redo their records."
If the legislation passes, Oates stands to make a killing in Dallas County alone, where County Clerk Earl Bullock already pays Oates nearly a million dollars a year to preserve his records.
"If it [the bill] is enacted as law, it will give us the opportunity to collect that additional fee and to recreate old records that otherwise haven't been recreated," Bullock says.
Every year, Bullock says a half-million documents are filed in the real estate section of his office alone. At the $19 he plans to charge for each one-page document, Bullock will raise at least $9.5 million a year.
The excess money would be used to microfilm records filed before 1964, which are still in paper form, and to pay for a multimillion-dollar automation and storage project that is already under way, Bullock says.
Kelley, the GRS lobbyist, says he's aware of the clerks' concerns and is currently working with them and county commissioners to reach a compromise.
Kelley and the clerks do agree on one thing--if the Oates bill is passed, the money should be earmarked only for records preservation, and not be susceptible to raids by commissioners courts.
"That's one place where we agree with 'em," Kelley says. "If commissioners courts can dip into it [the fund] and use it to fix potholes, then there's no business for government records or any of these other vendors. We're not in the street business.
