Municipal Clerks Week is coming up. Get to know your city clerk.

More than 9,000 boxes of records are at the city of Albuquerque records center. That could represent “millions” of items total, said City Clerk Ethan Watson, including microfilm of Albuquerque Police Department files, building plans and job applications. At the vault at the city clerk’s office, there are bound copies of City Council minutes dating back to the 1800s.

Records center staff work to digitize city records, which can go back decades. On Wednesday, staffers removed staples and smoothed out large building plans, preparing them for scanning.

“It’s not a quick process,” Watson said.

A former attorney, Watson was appointed as a deputy city clerk in 2018 — his first time working in a city clerk’s office, despite having worked for public entities in the past. Watson is not an at-will employee, meaning he can’t be fired at-will; the mayoral appointee’s term is tied to current Mayor Tim Keller’s and could only be terminated after a finding by the Office of the Inspector General.

Over his past six years with the city, Watson said he’s seen a massive increase in the number of public records requests. The Albuquerque office is unusual, Watson said, because it focuses primarily on state Inspection of Public Records Act requests, although city clerks in smaller municipalities may have other responsibilities.

The office also manages the public financing program for candidates, hears election ethics complaints and handles campaign finance — and “we pay for runoffs” in elections, Watson said. Petition signatures are also reviewed by the city clerk’s office.

Watson called the city clerk’s office “the glue of government.”

“We keep the paper organized,” Watson said. “Records and information management is a huge part of our work. I was an attorney previously, and that’s also a big part of what attorneys do: information management.”

With May 5 being the start of Municipal Clerks Week, the Journal sat down with Watson to talk about the role of a city clerk.

Editor’s note: These responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: There has been a lot of discussion about IPRA lawsuits filed and the backlog of requests. What are the challenges there, and what do you think it would take to get through that?

A: The Council and the Mayor’s Office has provided us with a significant amount of staffing (funding) to hire contract staff, which we’ve done, and that is helping me — our numbers are going down.

The second component ... is larger requester outreach. Most people only submit one request a year … probably less than 100 people submit more than one a year. And then there’s a smaller group, within that, who submit significantly more than one.

We have some requesters who have more than 100 requests a year. They tend to be law firms and they tend to be seeking a lot of records, which they’re allowed to do, but it just does take us a lot of time. … Scanning is another part of that — making sure we’re making records more available and more accessible internally for the records we can’t publish online.

But I think it’s also legislative modernization. Although there have been changes to IPRA exemptions, there have not really been changes — significant changes — to IPRA procedure since before there was widespread computer use.

Q: How big is the backlog right now?

A: We currently have around 2,200 open requests. We receive close to 1,200 to 1,600 requests a month. The backlog is around, as of this morning, 1,500 requests.

Q: Do you think it’s a good system — keeping the clerk’s term tied to the mayor’s?

A: I don’t really know; I haven’t served in another system.

I do think there’s value in having continuity and records management. … I think a lot of the work we’re doing is necessary, regardless of who’s driving the ship. But I can also understand why it’s important to periodically review who’s in the clerk’s office or who’s in various positions.

Q: In the past five years, what have the biggest changes been in the field?

A: Couple things. I think one of the biggest things is the records that we have been able to digitize. I think that’s been a huge game-changer for a lot of departments. … When I joined five years ago, we were getting 6,000 requests a year, and now it’s over 12,000.

The biggest component of that really has been the growth of lapel (camera video). Five years ago, every traffic accident didn’t necessarily have an OBRD (on-body recording device) attached to it. … The growth of IPRA has been the most unanticipated challenge.

Q: We talked a bit about some of the technology that your office uses. Is there anything else?

A: The main thing we really use is the scanners. Scanning and data entry … we have to enter the data and whatever the record is, if it’s a plan, it’s gonna be the address; if it’s a police report, it’s going to be the date of birth and the name and the case number.

I will say we are looking into stuff like AI and machine learning to see if that can help us in the future. There’s a lot of discussion about this at the federal level in terms of processing FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and redacting. I’m paying attention to it. The technology seems a little bit new, and so we haven’t moved on it yet.