Two years ago, Governor Cuomo unveiled a new government portal called “open.ny.gov.” At that time the governor proclaimed, “"This new website will dramatically increase public access to one of our most valuable assets - data. As it expands and evolves over time, open.ny.gov will spark innovation, improve efficiency, promote accountability, and bring the people back into government."
Fast forward to last week and the governor was under siege for his program to purge from the state email system all electronic correspondence that was over 90 days old. How can the Administration reconcile moving so dramatically from proudly promising openness to undermining it?
Ironically, as the state was unveiling its open.ny.gov, it was quietly implementing a policy to delete all of the emails of all state workers. What provoked the media’s interest last week was an internal memo that surfaced outlining the policy. The logic, according to the governor’s office, was that as the state consolidated its older computer systems to a new cloud-based system, the 90-day deletion policy was put into place for the entire new system.
The state’s new system purges deleted mail after 90 days and makes sure that mail “cannot be recovered.” The Cuomo Administration document says that all mail -- whether manually deleted or not -- “will be subject to the 90 day retention policy.”
The state's policy requires employees to manually retain emails that are the subjects of FOIL requests or are necessary for litigation. Of course, how will government workers know if such emails are necessary for litigation before the 90 day deadline? Unless the litigation has already been filed, they probably won’t.
The Cuomo Administration announced that mass purging of email records is beginning across several state government agencies. The governor's chief information officer argued that the email purge was a cost-saving measure aimed at “making government work better.”
But the move seems designed to hide information.
New York's contract with Microsoft, which runs the new cloud-based system, allows each employee to have 50 gigabits of email storage. The storage is enough to handle 30 years' worth of messages.
Cuomo’s new policy stands in contrast to the federal government’s, which mandates that emails be retained for three to seven years. Starting in 2015, the emails of federal employees will be saved for at least seven years, and executive staff emails will be saved indefinitely. New York State can surely be as transparent as the federal government.
Government runs on email, and access to email and other electronic records has become a cornerstone of public accountability and transparency. The Cuomo policy of using centralized software to automatically delete state employee emails after 90 days is resulting in the destruction of emails, which are considered public records under New York’s Freedom of Information Law.
It’s been said, “90% of government emails are junk.” But under the Cuomo Administration’s 90-day email destruction policy, how does the public know whether the 10% of emails that are supposed to be saved are being saved? And, what can be done if they are not?
New Yorkers should demand that the Cuomo Administration end the automatic destruction of emails after 90 days, and instead take advantage of the state’s modern email technology by issuing a uniform policy of saving state emails for seven years. If the Administration won’t budge, then the legislature should act by making it illegal to do so.
Blair Horner is the Legislative Director of the New York Public Interest Research Group.
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