A topic that has been on the backburner for the county for the last several years reemerged late last week.

Court Administrator Carol Bealor and Information Systems Director Kerry Collins delivered a report to the Cass County Board of Commissioners about the possibility of implementing a document imaging system for the county during the board’s Committee of the Whole meeting, held Thursday night at the county annex building in Cassopolis.

The two officials laid out a projected plan for how the county can get a computerized document system in place for its friend of the court and child support division of the prosecutor’s office, which included a timeline of the work involved with getting such a project off the ground.

“To give you an idea of the scope of the project, from the kickoff date until we go live is six months,” Collins said. “That involves the configuration of all the software and creation of all the workflows associated with the all of the documents they have. Friend of the Court alone has 150-200 different document types that have to have workflows created specifically for them.”

Members with the county government have discussed the creation of a countywide imaging system for the past six years, Collins said. Working in cooperation with County Administrator Roger Fraser, the members of the county imaging committee have visited other counties using these systems to help determine a course of action for Cass.

The committee recommended beginning digitization efforts of documents for the FOC and child support offices first, mainly because the county could receive up to 66 percent reimbursement for the project from the state for implementing imaging in those divisions. If this initial work is successful, the county will begin implementing the system in other divisions, such as the administrator or treasurer offices, over the course of the next seven years, Collins said.

“We looked at different models of how long we can implement this,” he said. “If we take it as one huge bite and just buy everything for everybody and put in place, you can’t do that.”

Among the provisions of the imaging plan is the creation of two new positions in the FOC office and IT department to help maintain and oversee the new imaging system once it’s in place. Among these duties would be overseeing the scanning of the documents already maintained by the county courts, Court Administrator Bealor said.

“That’s a big project,” Bealor said. “In all the counties that we have been to that have gone on imaging, I don’t know any of them that have all their back scanning done.”

While the committee doesn’t have firm estimates on how much the project would cost the county, they are budgeting $350,000 from the county’s capital improvement fund, Collins said.

“We know it’s a big capital expenditure. We’re not trying to give you the impression that it’s not,” Bealor said. “But if we’re going to move forward on this, we want to do it in the right way.”

Collins is currently working on developing a request for proposal for the hardware and software the county would need to purchase for the new scanning system. The IT director hopes to have recommendations for vendors for the project ready for the board’s approval in July, he said.