We realize a change in the city of Auburn's handling of public records is not particularly exciting to most of you, but we can assure you it is vitally important and could potentially affect you.
For instance, copies of fire and police reports for victims are free. Since these reports are always needed for insurance purposes, this is a nice thing for the city of Auburn to do, considering they used to charge $3 for such services.
Also, for those of you who may need multiple reports, the first five copies are free.
After those initial five copies, however, the price of copies has now been raised from 10 cents to 25 cents.
This price rise is certainly understandable and is not unexpected, given both the current economic climate and that Auburn's per copy charges were far lower than most across Alabama.
The new rate puts Auburn on parity with Tuscaloosa, Columbiana and our sister city Opelika, and has been a change that honestly needed to happen.
The city will also charge $25 per hour on larger jobs that require more time to complete.
From the city's perspective, these changes should help bring in extra revenue, or at least help better cover the costs of operations for making these reports available to the community.
These changes are great for a large swath of people, but there is one group of people the changes aren't necessarily the best for: those of us in the journalism community.
Every week, we comb through the city's crime reports for story ideas and, of course, those much talked about DUIs we run each week.
We make a promise here to you, our readers, that we will continue to search through these reports in the same deliberate fashion we do now.
We won't be bringing you a'la carte crime reports, grabbing a random handful and running out of the police station.
And, rest assured, we will get every DUI each week. That will never change.
The next logical step for the city of Auburn in its revitalization and upgrading of its public record keeping should be digitalization.
We live in a technological age, and it's time our bureaucracy and record keeping moves to reflect changes within our society.
In terms of accessibility and ease of use, digital records are the wave of the not-so-distant future, and this is a wave Auburn needs to catch.
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