The Shasta County Board of Supervisors is set to approve a county policy that would institute the automatic deletion of emails after one year and of other electronic communications, including chat messages, after 90 days.

Policy Details

The newly drafted policy requires county employees to individually differentiate between record and non-record information, making them responsible to retain any information that may classify as public record before auto-deletion occurs. It defines public records as any writing with information relating to the conduct of the public’s business prepared, owned, used or retained by the County.

The proposed policy is an update to current Shasta County policy, which does not specify retention dates for non-record messages or emails saying retention should be determined by the content of the message, not the medium, and calling on staff to routinely discard non-vital emails.

State Law and Public Records

California law sets no standard timeline for email retention, allowing local jurisdictions to set their own policies instead. A 2019 bill passed by legislators before being vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, would have set county email retention policies across the state at a minimum of two years. Newsom considered it too burdensome to counties.

The county did not provide answers to questions about the policy sent late last week. On a related topic, the board plans to issue a letter of support for AB 1821, a measure that would allow government agencies to delay responses to certain public records requests and make requested deemed commercial, more costly.

Original reporting: Shasta Scout (Redding) — read the source article.