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LOIS HENRY: Email plague spreads to Orange County

The Bakersfield Californian | Monday, Jan 09 2012 09:00 AM

Last Updated Monday, Jan 09 2012 11:37 AM

If you think I'm the only goober who frets over how public agencies handle emails, check out what's happening in the City of Anaheim.

It's highly instructive in how not to conduct the public's business.

I'm hoping our own City of Bakersfield staffers take note as they continue preparing a report on the legal requirements of retaining emails.

The City Council requested this back in October. Talk about a breakneck pace.

The report is said to be still in the works but is expected to be presented at the next Legislative and Litigation Council Committee meeting, which may be Feb. 21.

Their sense of urgency underwhelms me.

In Orange County, meanwhile, the Voice of OC, an online and non-profit news agency, opened a big, old squishy can of worms recently after its reporters made a public records request for emails between Anaheim City Council members and that city's Planning Department.

Those are absolutely public communications and should be retained for a minimum of two years, according to state law.

So guess what happened?

Shortly after receiving that request, a Planning Department staffer sent a department-wide email ordering workers to purge "old" or "unnecessary" documents and threatening them with disciplinary action if they didn't toe the line.

Of course, someone sent that email to the Voice of OC, which printed it verbatim on Tuesday (such fun!).

Anaheim's mayor came out Thursday with a lame statement about how the purge directive was a mistake and they were taking "corrective action" yadda, yadda, yadda, as if it was an isolated incident.

But it wasn't.

Turns out Anaheim's Community Preservation Manager had sent a similar email, around the same time, forbidding code enforcement employees from archiving "any emails for any purpose," according to the Voice of OC's Friday story.

Hmmmm. A systematic, citywide attempt to destroy emails? Sounds familiar.

But first, one more word about Anaheim and why having access to public emails is so important.

According to the Voice of OC: "The (Planning Department's) order came at the end of a year in which several high-level Anaheim officials, including City Manager Thomas Wood, resigned in the wake of conflict-of-interest revelations in the city's Building Division. And earlier this month, a Voice of OC public records request revealed an email chain that shows Councilwoman Kris Murray pressuring city staff on behalf of her private employer."

As I've said several times before, government corruption and waste do not stand up and wave their hands at you. They are most often buried in day-to-day interactions. Those interactions are almost exclusively done through email.

Now, back to Bakersfield.

No one -- as far as we know -- has sent such ham-fisted directives as those in Anaheim. But I contend the policies here add up to the same offensive behavior.

Back in 2009, City Manager Alan Tandy quietly instituted a policy that all city employee email be automatically destroyed every 30 days. For employees in the City Manager's department, the auto destruct is set for 14 days. That's all emails -- sent, trashed, junk -- everything.

If an employee deems a particular email worth keeping, they must copy and save it elsewhere on their computer or print it out. Neither option is searchable by the City Clerk's office, by the way, which is tasked with gathering documents when a Public Records request comes in.

Employees can also put an email into the City's Laserfiche document storage system, if they've had the proper training.

If none of those steps is taken, bye bye email.

The California Public Records Act unequivocally states that emails are public records. While the act doesn't lay out how long they must be kept, Govt. Code Section 34090 does -- a minimum of two years.

That seems pretty clear to me.

But the city's view is that emails are only public records as long as they exist.

Once they're destroyed, they never were public records.

City Attorney Ginny Gennaro describes emails as "transitory documents," a term that has no legal weight whatsoever in any public record statutes or case law, according to Terry Francke, an attorney for Californians Aware, a public agency watchdog organization.

Oh, and, by the way, the city's new email setup has a perfectly good archiving system already paid for by taxpayers. Tandy has refused to allow it to be turned on, however.

Government "transparency" gets a lot of lip service these days. Every politician, and even most bureaucrats, will claim they're all for it. Well? Here's their chance to prove it.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at http://www.bakersfield.com, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com