ARTICLE
COURTESY OF THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
By
Linda Kleindienst | Tallahassee
Bureau
Posted February 16, 2005
TALLAHASSEE --
When it comes to state waiting lists, the Florida Department of
Business and Professional Regulation has the big daddy of them
all -- 7 million paper documents waiting to be copied.
With file cabinets overflowing and boxes piling up in the basement,
agency officials are asking the state Legislature for $1 million to
get rid of the paper stacks that have piled up over the past two
years.
"On the lower level in this building it looks like you could
begin building cubicles with walls of boxes. We have an
overflow," said Jean Whitten, DBPR's budget director.
The staff estimated the extent of the backlog by counting stuffed
file cabinets and boxes that have been piling up in storage areas.
Broken microfiche machines mostly are to blame. Now the agency is
asking state lawmakers to help them copy the paper onto a more
permanent -- and compact -- electronic system that is readily
accessible.
But some lawmakers are suggesting that ineptness has played a hand
in the agency's problems and a recent internal audit points out a
"significant inefficiency" in record management in some of
DBPR's divisions.
Whitten stunned a House budget committee last week when she told
them of the piles of paper that had been accumulating. She called
the system "archaic" and said, "we've not been able
to keep up with the volume of documents."
And there's no money in the budget to fix the microfiche machines.
On Tuesday, members of the House State Administration Appropriations
Committee again tried to grasp how the agency got so backed up.
"DBPR should have come to us and asked us for help," said
Rep. Julio Robaina, R-Miami.
"The more I hear, the more concerns I have," said Rep.
Franklin Sands, D-Weston. "It's indicative of a much larger
problem that perhaps is endemic in the agency."
DBPR licenses one out of every 16 Floridians, handling 250,000 new
applications a year and 355,000 renewals, a paper-intensive job. It
also issues licenses in 200 categories that range from electricians
and cosmetologists to auctioneers and professional boxers. About 4
million of the documents involve the board that regulates the
real-estate profession.
The backlog has not affected licenses being issued or complaints
being investigated -- it's just clogging up the office until the
documents can either be copied onto microfiche or be put into some
other computer-friendly system.
If nothing else, the proliferation of paper could create a safety
hazard. Should the building catch on fire, Whitten said there is no
backup for the documents, which include personnel files,
applications for real-estate and other professional licenses, copies
of legal proceedings and condominium complaints.
The estimate: 14 cents a page, for a total of $1 million. The agency
hopes to outsource the job to a private vendor.
Robaina, a frequent critic of DBPR, suggested that inefficiency and
poorly trained staff could also have something to do with the
problem.
"They have a lack of personnel, there is no tracking of
documents, they don't know what they're supposed to do with the
files and people in there are just not trained well," Robaina
said.
Using a calculator, Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, R-Miami, guessed the
backlog could take years to take care of.
"But just think of all the square footage we could save,"
he added.
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