What to leave, what to take?

Members of the South Dakota National Guard, most from the 139th Brigade Support Battalion, help the Brookings County Register of Deeds office move records books Monday afternoon, from the Brookings County Courthouse to the new records room in the Brookings City & County Government Center. The Guard members offered help during their two-week annual training, and their assistance came four days earlier than expected, keeping Register of Deeds Beverly Chapman on her toes./ Register of Deeds record books left the Brookings County Courthouse on Monday afternoon through a first-floor window. Photos by Jill Fier/Register City, county staffers prepare for The Big Move

BROOKINGS Anybody whos ever packed up a house and trucked everything across town or across the country knows what a pain moving can be.

Youre climbing out your comfort zone to jump into uncharted waters to say nothing of the time-consuming, very real work of sorting and packing a lifetimes belongings and then making the new home your personal space.

Now imagine youve been accumulating stuff for a hundred years, and instead of Mom, Dad and the kids youve got more than 60 people and more than a dozen different departments to get settled. That might give you some idea of the massive upheaval the workers at city hall and the courthouse are going through these days in preparation for the Big Move to the Brookings City & County Government Center.

As city manager and commission assistant, Jeff Weldon and Stephanie Ellwein have been handed the task of herding a gaggle of box-toting humans into a brand-new administrative center.

The actual physical move of county and city offices is scheduled to take place next week, from June 11-15, but weve already been at it for six months, Ellwein announced in mid-April. The courthouse clan knew theyd have their hands full, by virtue of the fact that they and their predecessors had been accumulating documents for a entire century and those would have to be dealt with.

The county department heads joined in a transition team to plan for the exodus.

Destroying unnecessary records

Since April, Ellwein explained, courthouse staffers have been destroying duplicate records strictly according to state document destruction policies. Register of Deeds Beverly Chapman even had to get approval from Pierre to dump some of her old papers.

Ellwein says the county staffers even had to pull boxes of records from the crawl spaces below the courthouse. At the time, she said, they couldve used a couple of trained cave explorers.

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What to leave, what to take?