The council's approach to e-mail retention varies widely: While some council staffers print out copies of every e-mail from constituents, others delete everything except e-mails related to specific city policies, or assume that creating backup copies isn't their responsibility. The result: If you want to eavesdrop (for example) on the candid policy discussions that take place on public officials' e-mail, odds are, you can't. It's likely that the records just won't be there.
The city's e-mail policy, which dates back to 1996, stipulates that any e-mails that include substantive information should be saved. The problem is, the policy is vague about which communications are "substantive" and which ones it's okay to trash. City Clerk Judith Pippin, the person in charge of the city's public records, had to look in the dictionary when asked to define "substantive." (Under state law, according to state regional archivist Mike Saunders, any record "that documents the business and operations" of an agency, including correspondence and meeting notes, should be saved; that would seem to include many messages city employees say they delete.)
The reason this matters is that if city officials have the power to determine, absent any definition, which documents to keep and which to destroy, lots of records of potential interest to the public may never see the light of day. E-mails between mayoral communications director Casey Corr and his staff about the reconfirmation of former Seattle City Light chief Gary Zarker might not have been seen as "substantive," but they certainly helped the public understand the kind of behind-the-scenes campaigning that Nickels' staff was up to once the e-mails came to light. "Many times, the most significant communications are in e-mails, because that's when people let their hair down," open-government advocate Chris Leman says.
