[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO

[Wes Benedict]

Around 300 boxes with the miscellaneous "slips of paper" have been 
shredded since 2013. I spent many days on that work myself doing a first 
and second pass through the mountain of junk in the cool, damp, 
rat-infested dungeon storage underneath the Watergate complex, and then 
doing 3rd and 4th passes at our storage units after moving the stuff to 
Alexandria. (I did not shred the stuff myself--just identified the boxes 
and then had a professional service handle it).

I am not exaggerating about the rats. I do not recall finding dead rats 
in any boxes and did not necessarily see rats inside our particular 
unit, but there were dead dried out rat carcasses less than 20 feet 
outside the door to our unit and in the hallway leading up to our unit 
and inside adjacent units.

In addition to things that have been shredded, I did not count the 
number of boxes of stuff that I threw away that did not need to be 
shredded. I also personally tore apart, dismantled, and sawed when 
necessary (with my personal Bosch circular saws and drill), large 
painted plywood structures that I think were used in the 2000 and 2004 
national conventions (along with the wooden pallets).

For a decade, it seemed, no one was willing to throw things away. I 
can't blame them. Who wants to throw something away when someone might 
complain later? Plus, it's easier to just box up an old employees stuff 
and push it aside rather than go through it and sort it all out.  The 
result was valuable things were getting buried by old broken furniture 
and useless pieces of returned mail slips that had no value. Boxes of 
potentially valuable documents were getting crushed and split and were 
spilling in the damp basement of the Watergate. The basement of the 
Watergate obviously wasn't climate controlled and the storage facilities 
were down an underground hallway from the dumpsters for CVS and the 
grocery store Safeway, and just 200 yard crawl for rats from the shores 
of the Potomac. Grocery stores generate a lot of smelly garbage that 
attracts rats.

For the most part, I did not go through many individual boxes and sort 
through individual pieces of stuff. I either kept the whole box, or 
through the whole box out (or shredded if necessary).

We still have over a dozen 4-drawer file cabinets and maybe 100 boxes of 
stuff that needs to be gone through more carefully. That takes a lot of 
time. When it's time to bring the stuff back from Colorado, I expect the 
content to be 15% of it's original size. That's because there is still 
stuff to throw away, and also, for things like fundraising letters that 
were sent in 1992--there are probably 5 or 10 copies of each.

That stuff is getting older every day, but at least we now have it 
stored in a climate controlled storage unit in Alexandria, instead of 
the basement of the Watergate.

I probably inadvertently  threw some things out that we wished I hadn't, 
but I feel like my actions to jettison some garbage even if there was 
some collateral damage, was urgent, and necessary for the greater good 
of the documents that were saved, and because we needed space for our 
more recent documents.

A few photos attached.

Wes Benedict, Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee, Inc.
1444 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314
(202) 333-0008 ext. 232, wes.benedict at lp.org
facebook.com/libertarians @LPNational
Join the Libertarian Party at: http://lp.org/membership

On 3/24/2017 4:43 AM, Alicia Mattson wrote:
> Having spent some time digging through these materials a few years 
> ago, I know there are a LOT of boxes of old membership forms with 
> hand-written signatures on the membership certification.  I don't 
> imagine those going online for the world to see, so why ship 50 boxes 
> to Colorado and back?
>
> I don't recall a terribly high percentage of those files being things 
> that are of historical value that would belong in an online archive.  
> Some of it was, but much was not.  Old invoices and vendor contracts.  
> Miscellaneous contents of the desk drawers of former employees.  Is 
> there really enough historical material to fill a UHaul?

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 1996 Browne campaign receipts.JPG
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 79765 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business/attachments/20170324/d3ce303f/attachment-0008.jpe>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 2007 Daily Reports--donations.JPG
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 90853 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business/attachments/20170324/d3ce303f/attachment-0009.jpe>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Survey response forms.JPG
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 69400 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business/attachments/20170324/d3ce303f/attachment-0010.jpe>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: DSC02633.JPG
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 1352736 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business/attachments/20170324/d3ce303f/attachment-0011.jpe>