"Is e-mail a public document that needs to be preserved?"
That question appears in an April 1994 edition of the Star Tribune. A generation and zillions of government e-mails later, Minnesota and many other states still haven't answered the question.
Attorneys for Hennepin County are currently fighting a Minneapolis man's request for copies of the sheriff's e-mails all the way to the appellate courts, arguing that it shouldn't have to search through them using keywords.
Meanwhile, Hennepin Sheriff Rich Stanek enacted a new policy to delete all his office's e-mails after 30 days. The rest of the county will trash e-mails after six months. Similar mass deletions of e-mails already happen in the governor's office, the city of St. Paul and other agencies.
In response to this, some Minnesota legislators — whose own e-mail is exempt from the public records law — have suggested forcing government agencies to hold onto their e-mails for longer, so the public has a better chance to read them.
"I understand it's expensive to store all this data. I get that," said Rep. Peggy Scott, R-Andover, who chairs the House Civil Law and Data Practices Committee. "The fact of the matter is, it's created by government and the Minnesota Data Practices Act says you've got to keep it. … There could be a lot of shenanigans that take place if you're destroying data after 30 days."
Through all this wrangling, it is good to know that it's happening just about everywhere else in America. We should also take solace that Democratic and Republican politicians alike are fighting pitched battles to avoid letting you read their e-mail.
In Chicago, Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel released 2,700 e-mails from a personal account last month to settle a lawsuit by a nonprofit watchdog group, the Better Government Association.
