Douglas County leaders are making big plans to put away tons of paperwork.

And finding space for it all bags of old election ballots, cabinets of closed court files, envelopes with monthly phone records and thousands of other piles of paper can’t come soon enough.

“We’ve got crap stored everywhere,” said Charles Jones, a county commissioner, standing last week among crammed shelves in a rooftop closet at the Judicial & Law Enforcement Center, 111 E. 11th St. “And a lot of this stuff ought to be stored someplace better than here. There are things people need to get to, day in and day out.”

From razing an old church by South Park to building a subterranean records depot beneath a two-deck parking garage next to the law enforcement center, commissioners are busy filing ideas for filling the county’s storage needs for the next 40 years.

So far, they’ve agreed on at least one thing: Putting up a new building at the Douglas County 4-H Fairgrounds would be a good start. Commissioners already have set aside $450,000 next year for that project, which would combine records storage with room for lawn mowers and other county maintenance equipment.

Commissioner Bob Johnson is focusing his attention on an old church at 1242 Mass., at the south edge of South Park.

The building already houses the county’s public works department, but the A-frame chapel is so packed with miscellaneous documents that County Administrator Craig Weinaug likens the place to “the last scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.'”

Jones called the church building a “fire trap” and “an accident waiting to happen,” given its packed-to-the-gills condition.

Johnson’s seen enough.

“The land is a tremendous asset, and the building’s a liability,” he said. “I think, in the long term, we need a bulldozer down there to excavate all that stuff and build another building.”

The replacement structure likely would be two or three stories tall and used for county offices, he said. Its basement could be set aside to accommodate files for courts and other county departments located either upstairs in the new building or across the park in the Douglas County Courthouse and law enforcement center.

Records aside, Johnson said, the county needed to think about moving some departments out of the courthouse and into more customer-friendly space.

The courthouse is short on parking and lacks adequate waiting areas, he said, especially for the long lines of people who crowd into the Treasurer’s Office at the end of the month to renew vehicle registrations and conduct other business.

“We’re taxing this building to the limit,” Johnson told his fellow commissioners during a meeting last week. “We really ought to have a bigger, better facility to take some of the pressure off.”

Jones agrees with the need to boost customer friendliness. He’d like to see the county buy or build its own place somewhere on South Iowa Street, to replace the leased space used by the Treasurer’s Office and building and codes officials at 27th and Iowa streets.

A new two-deck parking garage next to the law enforcement center also could make things easier on county residents, he said, as well as help solve some records-storage problems.

The garage could include a third level underground, with a connection that would give court personnel and others in the center a secure and convenient place to keep important information, Jones said.

Jones has asked Weinaug to see what might be feasible in terms of cost and construction. But one thing’s for sure: After walking from basement to roof at the law enforcement center last week, he’d seen enough.

At his first stop, he squeezed past the 120 file drawers filled with civil case files and crammed into the basement, where they share space with air-handling systems, cans of binding primer and jugs of industrial coil cleaners.

Earlier he’d heard about how the county pays $150 a month to rent an off-site storage unit for license plates and forms for the Treasurer’s Office.

“It’s bad,” Jones said, shaking his head. “It’s all bad.”