Here is a little fur-ball of an issue that got carried along between two administrations. Important emails between former Governor Douglas’ Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) officials involved in a legal dispute with the Vermont State Employees Association were deleted and are missing. The VSEA originally sought ANR email records concerning a fired employee and a proposed computer employee monitoring system then the Douglas administration attempted to impose a $1,200 fee to access the email. The VSEA went to court against the Douglas administration and won the right to see the email free of charge.
A small scale Vermont version of the historic eighteen and one half minute gap? Fast forward to the Shumlin administration and the discovery now, that the relevant emails at some point were deleted.
When Abigail Winters, the union’s counsel, went to see the records, Shumlin officials at ANR told her the items couldn’t be found. Winters sent a letter to Jeb Spaulding, the secretary of the Agency of Administration, and Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell on Monday, alleging that the email correspondence was “willfully and permanently” deleted. Sorrell, she wrote, failed to place a litigation hold on the documents.
The Shumlin administration has given a high priority to transparency. Secretary of State Jim Condos recently completed what he called a “transparency tour” to help the state’s public officials. Regarding transparency (digital and otherwise) Condos suggests the problem might lie with starving beast budget priorities:
“It’s an ongoing process that frankly needs resources,” he said. “With all due respect to the current administration and the past administration, a lot of those resources have been taken away because budgets have been cut and slashed and personnel reduced.
However Shumlin’s Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding sounded a wee bit bristly about the attention the deleted email issue has generated and wished the VSEA had come to him before going to the press.
He was nonplussed by the attention the issue had generated among members of the media, and said it was a distraction from his work-[on LIHEAP]
In contrast Attorney General Sorrel seems more laid back about the issue. He has now started an inquiry but originally never imposed a litigation hold on relevant material-yet says if deleting the emails was intentional it shouldn’t have happened: “If they were deleted and not retrieved, then that was a total mistake and shouldn’t have happened. But we don’t know and we won’t know for days.”
Finally, at least to many untutored in these mysterious rules and rituals it might seem there is actually a law that may apply here. But what the heck, guess it’s not as if it is as important as a SSB (Sugar Sweetened Beverage) or something like that.
Disposition of public records – A custodian of public records shall not destroy, give away, sell, discard, or damage any record or records in his or her charge, unless specifically authorized by law or under a record schedule approved by the state archivist pursuant to 3 V.S.A. { 117(a)(5).