Fenty administration routinely destroyed government e-mails
By: Bill Myers
Examiner Staff Writer
June 28, 2009
The Fenty administration routinely destroyed official e-mails, throwing thousands of public records into the electronic garbage pile even as the city council was drafting legislation that would have prevented it, a top city official has admitted under oath.
In late 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty tried to give himself the authority to destroy electronic records every eight weeks. After hearing months of outrage from government watchdog groups and facing emergency legislation that would have forbidden the practice, Fenty announced that he was withdrawing the proposal early last year.
But the administration was destroying the records every two months until at least May 2008, Office of the Chief Technology Officer program officer Robert Mancini said in a recent affidavit obtained by The Examiner.
“Because there is no retention schedule for e-mails for the District of Columbia government and because of cost and storage considerations, it was the general practice of OCTO to retain backup tapes [of e-mails] for [a] period of 8 weeks, after which the tapes were recycled and copied over,” Mancini wrote in the June 15 affidavit.
D.C. policy caps the number of e-mails in a worker’s inbox. An e-mail deleted from an inbox is still preserved on backup digital tapes. Once the tapes are erased, the e-mail is gone. D.C. law has long defined e-mails as public records but hasn’t been clear about how long they should be preserved.
“You’ll find it’s a big, fat gray area,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an Arlington-based nonprofit group that fights for open records. “It’s the next big litigation area.”
After The Examiner began asking questions about his affidavit, Mancini issued a statement, which he said he hoped would clear up the “confusion [that] has ensued relative to the e-mail data backup practices” of his agency. The practice of routinely erasing e-mail tapes, he said, ended in May 2008.
That’s good timing: The following month, the D.C. Council passed a law forbidding the government to destroy e-mails until Fenty came up with some kind of preservation policy. The law gave Fenty 60 days to draw up the rules. He still hasn’t submitted the rules.
“They’re violating the law,” said Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3. “This is absurd.”
Mancini’s affidavit came out of litigation filed by the police union over the department’s disciplinary policies. The union sought several e-mails as part of its suit but the city claimed they had disappeared. Union chairman Kris Baumann said Mancini’s sworn statement was proof of “lawlessness.”
“For those who are benefiting right now,” he said, “they should be worried about what happens when the mayor’s office turns on them and they find there is no laws to protect them.”
bmyers@washingtonexaminer.com
