There has been some discussion lately about local governments deleting e-mails.
This presentation out of Laredo does a great job of explaining many of the retention requirements.
The fundamental rules come from the Texas Local Government Records Act of 1989.
Some of the basics are:
- E-mails that deal with government business are government records — even if sent from a personal device.
- Destroying local government records can be a Class A misdemeanor and under certain cirsumstances a third degree felony under section 37.10 of the Texas Penal code. There are also criminal penalties under the Texas Public Information Act. These penalties could lead to removal from office.
- The sender is the custodian of the record. The receiver can delete messages unless
- the receiver needs to take action based upon the message
- the message is required for documentation
- The receiver may delete e-mails that are spam, personal, unsolicited mail like news articles, and carbon copies.
- For those emails that must be kept, the periods of time defined by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) indicate how long they must be kept. The periods of time generally are between 2 and 5 years, depending upon the nature of the message.
- The TSLAC defines messages that must be kept for documentation.
I have not been able to find a law or regulation that requires any Texas local government to keep all e-mails.
There are commercially available devices that allow a government to capture all incoming and outgoing e-mail traffic. These devices centralize the storage of the e-mails and thus make searching far easier. Instead of having to go to each desktop or device an administrator can search the central archive.
Maybe it is time for our local governments to install these e-mail archiving devices.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 