State employees often delete emails on controversial topics

IOWA CITY - Government employees in Iowa have no obligation under Iowa's Open Records law to save emails. In fact, some employees intentionally delete emails on controversial topics so the messages can't be made public under the law.

This became apparent this week when Associate University of Iowa Athletics Director Rick Klatt advised his colleagues to “delete this email after reading it” about a Jan. 28 message concerning the UI's response to the hospitalization of 13 football players.

“When we're communicating about a topic possibly of interest, you want to delete a draft,” Klatt told the Gazette. “It minimizes misinterpretation.”

Emails are considered public records in Iowa and can often provide insight into how government officials operate. Several media outlets, including the Gazette, received more than 100 pages of emails earlier this week that dealt with how the UI responded to the Jan. 24 hospitalization of athletes following a strenuous workout.

The documents showed UI officials disagreed about how to inform the public about the athletes' illness and how to respond to national media, like ESPN and Sports Illustrated.

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But the extent to which email can illuminate the inside operations of a government agency depends on whether officials use email and whether they save their messages.

“We live in a time when people are increasingly suspicious of government employees,” said Kathleen Richardson, a Drake University journalism professor and executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. “The more accountability the better.”

Iowa's State Records Commission requires that government agencies save certain “formal” documents for specific amounts of time. For example, the UI Athletics Department is required to save game contracts for three years past the current year, while travel vouchers can be destroyed one year after the current year.

These retention schedules do not include emails, which means public employees can use their own discretion about when to trash email messages.

“We delete things all the time,” UI General Counsel Carroll Reasoner said, pointing out that saving thousands of emails a week would be a storage nightmare.

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad saves all his emails, said Spokesman Tim Albrecht.

“All of our emails are kept forever because of Open Records requests,” Albrecht said. “It requires a significant amount of storage, but we want to have those for the sake of transparency.”

Just because it's legal for officials to delete controversial emails, doesn't mean it's good policy, open government advocates said.

“It indicates a bent toward secrecy that runs counter to the spirit of the law,” said Richardson, the Freedom of Information Council officer.

Jeff Stein, a Wartburg College journalism professor and administrator of the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting, said instructing public employees to delete emails about hot topics contradicts the nature of open government.

“That's no different than instructing people to read memos and then shred them to avoid a paper trail,” Stein said.

Private companies have record retention policies that run the gamut, said David Strom, a national computer and communications technology speaker and blogger. “Some immediately delete emails so they aren't discoverable, while others have retention schedules,” he said.

People seeking government emails can pay for the agency to retrieve deleted messages from backup servers, but it can be costly. The UI, for example, charges a minimum of $75 for computer searches with $75 an hour after that. There also may be limits to how long emails are stored on a backup server because of the volume of email sent and received by a large government body.

Storage of email messages shouldn't be too burdensome for small to medium-sized agencies, as long as the messages don't include video, Strom said.

Some government agencies in Iowa have been proactive about making emails public. The Iowa Board of Regents, which governs the state's public universities, posts online all emails that go to all the board members. This practice started in 2007 after the board was criticized for secrecy surrounding the UI presidential search.