Supes consider options to preserve courthouse records By Mark Thornton/[email protected] The Attala County Board of Supervisors responded to critical letters about record-keeping at the courthouse, saying they may consider building cabinets on the third floor to protect the historic documents. "Whose responsibility is it?" board president Eddie Womble asked board attorney John Shaw. Shaw said keeping records was up to the clerks of each office. "It would have to be a county-wide effort," he said. Two fires and decades of different officials with different filing systems have contributed to the disarray of the older papers, which are in the third-floor storage area of the courthouse. There, the documents have been unprotected and exposed to pigeon and rat droppings, the three out-of-towners wrote in letters to the editor in last week's Star-Herald. "Our records are kept as good or better than most counties," Chancery Clerk Gerry Taylor said. Supervisors said they would consider building cabinets in the unoccupied area of the courthouse. They also asked Taylor about the cost of transferring all of the county's records to microfilm, but no action was taken. Taylor said that storage space would soon be at a premium -- his office has accumulated nearly as many books of documents in the last 12 years as it had in the previous 150 years. Supervisors agreed to spend about $7,500 on cabinets at the chancery building.