Court approves county clerk’s archive plan, marriage license fee
In a Regular meeting following a public hearing Aug. 14, with no comments against, Grimes County commissioners approved the county clerk’s Records Archive Plan for 2020 and the associated fee. In a separate action, they approved a fee increase for Marriage Licenses.
During an overview of the Records Archive Plan, County Clerk Vanessa Burzynski advised that there is no change to the current $10.00 fee for recording of non-court documents. Pursuant to Texas Local Government Code 118.011, the Records Archive fee was established by the 83rd Texas Legislature for preservation and restoration services, and was set to expire in September, reverting to $5.00, but S.B. 658 passed by the 86th Legislature made the $10 fee permanent.
Under the Records Archive Plan, Burzynski’s numerous long-range restoration and preservation projects include removing mold and de-acidifying pages from old record books and placing them in hard cover binders, modernizing the records system, continuing to add records and information to the existing computer system, making as much public information as possible available on the internet and digitizing existing records to reduce or eliminate manual lookup and eliminate the use of microfilm.
Beginning with this budget year, projects include scanning and indexing old marriage, birth and death records, probate records and subdivision plats and developing a storage plan for older records stored at other locations.
She continued, “We’ve also just acquired the birth and death records from the City of Navasota. They are in book form and those will all need to be scanned into our system.”
Burzynski added, “We have a lot of old original marriage records from the 1800s and the early 1900s that are deteriorating that need to be preserved and scanned as well.”
Marriage License up $5
Beginning Sept.1 the fees for a Marriage Licenses will increase from $77 to $82, and an Informal Marriage License (common-law) will increase from $42 to $47.
Burzynski said, “In doing some research, I noticed that the other counties were charging $82 whereas we were charging only $77. The difference being we weren’t collecting that $10 fee. Apparently that extra $5 didn’t get added. To be in line with other counties, and compliant with the correct fee, I propose that we increase the fee to $82.”