Langley plans to remedy complex and more frequent records requests by increasing staff hours, establishing a better digital system and shifting some deputy clerk responsibilities.

On Monday, the second day of Sunshine Week for open government, Langley Finance Director and Clerk Debbie Mahler informed the city council of her plan to add hours for a part-time employee to work the front desk more. In doing so, one of the city’s deputy clerks could help her with some records requests.

Mahler is Langley’s public records officer, and most of the requests will still be her obligation.

“It’s not just the volume of electronic records, it’s that we don’t have a system,” Mahler said in a phone interview Thursday. “We don’t have any consistency.”

Records requests can be as simple as asking for a copy of a city ordinance or as complex and broad as asking for any documents — spanning email, memos, and formal city documents — that contain certain words. In Langley, not all records are digital so, depending on the breadth and scope of a request, it may mean going through physical pages.

“The central records part of it is a challenge for any city because when you’re 100 years old you have records in boxes that no one has taken time to turn into microfilm or whatever,” Mayor Fred McCarthy said in a phone interview Friday morning.

Having already budgeted for the change, Mahler told the council she would add 12 hours to a part-time employee, former police chief Bob Herzberg, to cover some front desk duties. That will allow deputy clerk Cheryl Knighton to set up a system of naming and labeling and to instruct employees on a simpler way of identifying and saving documents.

Currently, not all digital files and documents are saved on the city’s network. When a request comes in, such as one Mahler is working on now that asked for all of the city’s financial reports and budgets between 2008 and 2015, she has to go to each computer to look for documents that may pertain to the request, print them out and assemble them.

“That’s just a lot of sitting at the copier scanning,” she said.

“They’re a pain in the butt, but it’s information that the public is entitled to and we want to get it to them, we just need an easier way,” she added.

The staffing change was already budgeted for 2015. Mahler told the council she expected the increased hours, which will bump Herzberg from 10 to 22 hours per week starting April 1, to cost $11,500.

No other positions or departments are impacted by the staffing increase because it was included in this year’s budget. Mahler expected she would need to keep the positions through the year. The mayor, despite Mahler informing the council that Langley used to have a position to deal with records before the recession, said the city would not add a full-time position solely devoted to records requests.

“What we’ve added should be the right staffing level to handle what disclosure requests may come in in the future,” McCarthy said.

Langley will also look into how it can better host public documents. Mahler said the city has discussed setting up a public computer from which people can come to city hall to search records. The city has not, however, gone so far as to investigate what future record-keeping software or a public computer terminal may cost.