Governor's Emails Auto-Deleted After 60 Days
02/20/2012
Abercrombie Administration
UPDATED 2/21/2012 9 a.m.
For nearly a decade, the state has automatically deleted emails on computers in the Hawaii governor's office and all administration departments after just 60 days.
State officials say the state doesn't have the storage space to keep them so they are killed unless intentionally archived.
That's different than in other states reviewed by Civil Beat, where substantive emails are automatically archived as public records.
The question of email retention arose after Civil Beat learned that the Abercrombie administration says it received only 15 emails regarding the controversial appointment of Marc Alexander a year ago to be the state's homeless coordinator.
The email retention policy appears to have been issued in July 2002, the last year of the Cayetano administration. It's contained in a memorandum (which can be viewed at the end of this article) from then State Comptroller Glenn Okimoto to all department heads.
The policy, implemented that September, states the following:
This memorandum establishes an e-mail retention schedule of thirty days for the Executive branch in order to improve management of limited electronic storage resources of the state's e-mail servers. You are hereby directed to implement a practice of retaining e-mail on department e-mail systems for no more than thirty days.
The memo advises that emails that are to be retained can be copied to "local drive, diskette, CD, or tape, or print to paper and file."
A call from Civil Beat to Dean Seki, the current state comptroller, was not returned, so it is unclear whether the policy was later updated. DAGS is the department authorized to determine the disposition of state government records for the executive branch.
However, the emails are indeed deleted — but after two months, not 30 days.
"You are correct that the current administration inherited a legacy system," said Jocelyn Collado, senior communications manager with the state's Office of Information Management & Technology. "Additionally, it also inherited existing policies. Currently, the policy states that email messages are automatically deleted after 60 days unless they are marked for archiving."
