Government has leased the former Co-Op Supermarket building to house its private records for at least the next two years.

The Government Records Centre (GRC) will move from its present home in St.

George's to its new one in Hamilton next month, said Minister of Development, Opportunity and Government Services Terry Lister yesterday.

The GRC -- a section within the Bermuda Archives which is not open to the public -- spent the past 11 years housed in a Cable & Wireless-owned building on Barry Road.

For the next two years -- Government has an optional third year in its lease -- the records will be housed on the ground and basement floors of the old supermarket on Union Street.

Eventually Government intends to have a purpose-built Records Centre, noted Mr. Lister, which will help combat the problem of controlling moulds and mildew that arise from the high humidity when existing facilities are converted into storage facilities for archival-type documents.

It is hoped that this will be in place within the two-year period.

Mr. Lister disclosed that Government had been looking to move the Records Centre to a larger facility for some time and its hand was forced when Cable & Wireless decided to sell its building and issued it a notice to vacate by the end of the year.

He said Government looked at available buildings at Southside and Mill Creek in Pembroke before settling on a two-year lease at the Union Street building which is owned by the Bermuda Industrial Union.

The new facility will give Archive staff three times the space they had previously, Mr. Lister pointed out. And this will allow them to store up to 16,000 boxes as opposed to the 7,000 boxes they could store before.

The extra storage will also help free up clutter in Government offices as more files can be moved to the new facility which should be up and running by November.

Service will also be improved as the central site will have full-time staff and daily access to files as opposed the three-hour, once-a-week access the St. George's facility permitted.

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