Lewis County employees heading a renovation of the county’s record retention policies are so far pleased with the progress made.
Only about 2 percent of county employees still need to take the online training regarding record retention, according Karri Muir, clerk for the Board of County Commissioners, and Steve Wohld, IT services manager.
The training, which ends with a multiple-choice test, teaches employees about what records are, and after passing the test, employees are given the OK to delete transitory emails.
Transitory records are those that are non-formalizing or policy-setting such as messages pertaining to meeting times or office events.
“Kind of the muck that we can get rid of that really is not county business … our solution never really tackles the 5 or 10 percent of email that is work product. We’re just going to keep all that stuff,” Wohld said.
The approval to delete some emails makes employees responsible for their own records and aims to decrease the number of overall county emails being retained.
Currently the deleted emails are still being captured by the county, and a handful of employees’ emails were recently checked to ensure they are not deleting records that need to be kept.
Muir and Wohld audited each other’s emails as well as other employees.
“We want to make sure we’re practicing what we preach,” Wohld said.
All deleted emails were transitory; none were deleted that shouldn’t have been. Under previous practices all emails were captured, which has resulted in a backlog of more than 10 million emails.
Muir estimates she will continue to audit 10 email accounts per month. Any county employee’s email could be audited.
While policy changes regarding record retention are still being drafted, Wohld and Muri said an employee will have multiple chances to pass audits before their email will be shut down.
“It will be serious. They won’t have county email,” Wohld said. “... We’re paid professionals. If you can’t properly manage your email, we’ll get you the training you need so you can.”
If employees are questioning whether to delete an email, just keep it, he said.
Wohld said the plan is to stop capturing emails at the end of the first quarter in March, but before that happens the new policy has to be approved.
It will likely include policy for text messages, which is expected to tell employees to only send transitory texts.
As far as going through the 10 million email backlog to thin out the system, Wohld said they are unsure when that could happen.
The county recently received a public records request that is expected to take years to fulfill requiring staff to sift through and redact thousands of emails and other records.
Muir said a full-time public records employee has been approved for the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices and the jail. The county commissioners have been discussing hiring another for other county records.
Lawmakers on the House General Government & Information Technology Committee passed a bill limiting public records requests on Monday.
Muir said she would like to see lawmakers disallow requests for “any and all” records and instead require requests to be more specific.
“It would help so much,” Muir said.
