When Charles Clark’s wife, Anne, died unexpectedly in September, the 74-year-old Laguna Woods resident hoped to settle her estate quickly and focus his energy on mourning the woman he’d loved for more than two decades.
But he instead had another worry, prompted by the abrupt closure of an Ohio company that long held a monopoly over a simple yet crucial staple of government agencies across the United States: a special paper used to make death, marriage and birth certificates.
The summertime shuttering left Orange County and hundreds of other governments across the country scrambling to find a new paper source, with a limited supply on hand and no end in sight to people’s everyday demand for vital records.
It took six weeks for Clark to obtain seven certified copies of his wife’s death certificate. And when he got them, they came through the state, not Orange County, which restricted its sales to avoid running out completely.
“I can imagine the worry it caused to people in my situation,” Clark said. “It was very stressful.”
A solution is sight. The Clerk-Recorder’s Office lifted its restrictions this month after securing a new batch of paper through a printing company that worked overnight to manufacture the supply.
But restrictions at the Health Care Agency, which issues most death certificates and many birth certificates, remain as officials await their own order of the paper, which is printed with a specialized process called intaglio that is highly secure and countfeit resistant.
An emergency batch of 24,000 arrived this month, but the agency still is limiting copies to one each until an order of 450,000 arrives “hopefully within the next month,” said Marc Meulman, the agency’s Division Manager for Disease Control and Epidemiology.
That means more waiting for people like Clark who rely on mortuaries for death certificates. Orange County mortuaries depend on the Health Care Agency for the documents, so they’ve been having to order extra copies from the state registrar after obtaining an initial certificate through the county. Families of the dead now have to make two visits, first to get the original copy, then to pick up the certified copies once they arrive.
“It’s adding about a month to the time when they get their full supply of death certificates compared to a week or two,” said Robert Nethington, decedent affairs coordinator for Fairhaven Park and Mortuary in Santa Ana.
The problem started in July when Orange County officials called to order more paper from Sekuworks, long believed to be the only major supplier of the paper, and learned the company had closed.
Clerk-Recorder Hugh Nguyen began in August to encourage people to limit the number of certified copies they bought, and his office stopped responding to requests submitted through postal mail.
He secured a deal with the Grass Valley company Pacific Bancnote “in a nick of time,” said Dave Cabrera, spokesman for the Clerk-Recorder’s Office.
No other county in California had secured a new paper source when Orange County’s first shipment from Pacific Bancnote arrived in late October, Cabrera said. Veritrack, the printing company hired by Pacific Bancnote formed just after Sekuworks closed, employs many former Sekuworks officials, bought its machinery and leases its old building.
Veritrack’s owner traveled from Chicago to the facility in Harrison, Ohio, to help prepare Orange County’s first shipment, said Jim Columbus, Veritrack’s vice president of document security.
“He was actually packing boxes himself,” Columbus said.
Veritrack’s vice president for security programs management, Robert Sherwood, who like Columbus spent years at Sekuworks, attributed Sekuworks’ closure to mismanagement and underfunding.
“Jim and I had no idea the company was going to close,” Sherwood said. “I got a call at 4 a.m.”
The Health Care Agency had already ordered more paper through the Canadian Bank Note Paper Company when the Clerk-Recorder’s Office secured the supply from Pacific Bancnote, Meulman said. The Clerk-Recorder’s Office did the same, but Nguyen chose to order a batch of 40,000 from Pacific Bancnote as the Canadian company prepared a large order of 240,000. That arrived faster than the Health Care Agency’s emergency Canadian batch.
Pacific Bancnote charges about 21 cents per sheet, whereas the Canadian company charges nearly 30 cents per sheet, Cabrera said. The incoming shipments will give county agencies more than a year to decide who to buy from next.
Cabrera suspects it’ll be Pacific Bancnote because of the price.
Contact the writer: mcuniff@ocregister.com or 949-492-5122. Twitter: @meghanncuniff.
