TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

A Bakersfield City Council committee took up the issue of email retention Tuesday, with city staff saying a more extensive policy would waste time and money, and Councilwoman Sue Benham challenging them to look beyond maintaining the current policy.

The Legislative and Litigation committee, which Benham chairs, heard from City Attorney Virginia Gennaro, who said she recommends no change to the city's policy on keeping emails related to city business.

Under Bakersfield's policy, city employees decide what emails to keep and either print them, electronically save them or archive them on the city's Laserfiche database, which is searchable.

But anything city staff don't opt to save is automatically deleted after 30 days, or after 14 days for the city manager, city clerk and risk management offices.

Last year, council members asked staff to look into the city's policy after Californian columnist Lois Henry wrote about the city's retention practice.

Policies on email retention vary from city to city in California. State law doesn't explicitly call for retaining emails, but information in emails can qualify as public records, several officials told The Californian for a story earlier this week on email retention.

Gennaro said the city's policy is in line with other cities staff looked at, and to make it much different than those policies would open Bakersfield up to legal challenges.

"The policy works. It's not broken. It enables us to respond to public records requests," Gennaro told council members. "I would encourage you to keep the policy that we have," Gennaro said.

City Manager Alan Tandy also said no change is needed to the city's policy. Both Tandy and Gennaro cautioned against a policy change that would keep emails forever, saying that would have costs for electronic storage and staff time.

The city turned on an auto-delete feature in its email system because its computer systems were running slowly and space needed to be freed up, Tandy said. But city employees keep information that needs to be kept, he said, and that information is available.

"I do consider it to be like taking out the trash," Tandy said of the city's auto-delete practice. "This is email trash. It isn't value public records."

"The vast majority of communications in our system are trivial," Tandy said. He also outlined types of emails, such as spam mail and notices of events at Rabobank Arena, that city staff get regularly that shouldn't be retained.

"Would anybody reasonably say that spam (email) that gets through the (city's spam) filter should be maintained and the taxpayer pay for it? Probably not." Tandy said.

"That's not what we're talking about," Benham responded.

If council members want to keep the current policy in place, city staff could do a better job in educating employees about what emails need to be kept, Gennaro said.

"I'm not sure that I'm ready ... to say that we should maintain the status quo," Benham said. "I would definitely be interested in some recommendations about how we strengthen our policies and procedures and educate our staff to assure that email that the public should have access to are not deleted."

Gennaro said state law on records hasn't kept up with technology, and Benham agreed. But, Benham added, "We don't wait for the state to tell us what to do when we think something's important."

Benham said city staff should look at its training for employees on email retention before council members decide whether to change the current policy.

She also asked staff to contact city staff in Fresno about that city's policy. Fresno keeps all its emails indefinitely in an electronic "journal" whether they are deleted by employees or not, an employee in Fresno's Information Services Department told The Californian.

Councilman Rudy Salas asked that city staff also look at an option that would put a cap on how much email employees can keep in the system.

"We need to prove that we have nothing to hide," said Councilwoman Jacquie Sullivan, referring to public access to emails about city business. "I think it's the staff's responsibility to keep anything and everything that is needed." At the same time, she said she was sensitive to the amount of email generated daily by city business.

"If we have a hard and fast rule, it's just going to be very cumbersome," she said.

"We have to make it more easy for staff to get the information back to us that we need," she added a bit later.

But, said Benham, "The important principle involved here is not staff or council member convenience, but public access."