A planner and an organizer

When Paula Robinson took over the Flathead County Clerk and Recorder Office in 2003, she expected a lot of work, but it ended up being even more.

“I worked some long days, 5 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.,” she said.

After 10 years as assistant and 12 years as department head, Robinson is ready to retire and move on.

“The biggest change I’ll see is no structured 8 to 5 job,” she said. “Maybe I’ll visit Scandinavia or Scotland.”

Robinson started her childhood in Eastern Montana when her father, James Carlson, worked on the Fort Peck Dam. The family moved to the Flathead in 1958 when her father landed a job with the Anaconda Aluminum Co.

After graduating from Whitefish High School, she attended Flathead Valley Community College at its downtown Kalispell campus studying bookkeeping, accounting and business management. After two years, she went straight to work.

“I married young and needed to work,” she said.

After seven years with title companies, Robinson landed a job at the community college running an IBM Model 1130 punch-card computer. Her training came on the job.

“We processed report cards for the local high schools,” she said. “It was a big machine and noisy, but it was reliable.”

Robinson was hired on as the county’s assistant clerk and recorder under Sue Haverfield in December 1990. For the next decade, the department underwent the same changes as governments and businesses around the world — moving away from dumb terminals and mainframes to smaller and faster computers, more and more data storage, and streams of information coming and going on the Internet.

The department’s responsibilities at the time included overseeing recording, elections, plat room surveying, finance and GIS computer mapping.

A major change came after Robinson won election to head the department when it took over the county auditing. Consolidating finance and auditing in the same department posed a potential conflict of interest, Robinson said.

“The commissioners thought they were saving money, but in the end they didn’t — we had to contract out the auditing work,” she said.

Moving finance to a separate office reporting directly to the county commissioners was just one of the changes Robinson made at the Clerk and Recorder’s office.

“They needed a full-fledged finance department 25 years ago,” she said. “Part of the problem was they wouldn’t offer a high-enough salary to attract talented people.”

Some changes at the Clerk and Recorder’s office were mandated by statute, such as the 2002 Help America Vote Act that moved election ballots away from punch cards.

“We had to change the forms and equipment, educate voters and move from in-house software to Montana Votes via the Secretary of State Office,” she said.

Another change was moving GIS to a separate IT department.

“That wasn’t too difficult,” she said. “We have a good team that needs little supervision.”

A big project for Robinson was to finish a records preservation program that started under Haverfield.

“We serve 28 departments and preserve 5 million records,” Robinson said. “It’s the best records preservation program in the state — state officials come here to see it.”

Staff in various county departments now regularly scan documents and follow state retention standards, but the Clerk and Recorder has documents in paper or microfilm dating back a century.

Those are now stored in an off-campus secure building paid for with a $1 per page recording fee. Mortgage papers, birth and death records, court files, land records, county attorney files, sheriff’s office records, health department files — even local history books taken from the county library — fill shelves two stories high.

“I love taking on a project, taking it apart and making it work,” Robinson said. “I like improving and enhancing. I’m a planner and organizer.”

Robinson lives in Columbia Falls with her husband Richard, who’s retired from the lumber industry. Their three sons, Jeremy Kellogg and Michael and Steven Robinson, have grown up and moved on.

Robinson has sat on numerous boards, including United Way, Bad Rock Volunteer Fire Department and Whitefish Theatre Company, and she enjoys caning and rushing old furniture.

“I might start an antique store, like my mother Violet’s,” she said. “I have enough inventory for four years.”

She’s also been offered a two-week per year job as a support technician on voting equipment during elections in New York state.

“Whatever I do, I want to just enjoy life,” Robinson said. “Every single minute of every day.”