County being sued over public records

[Bob Wells]

Sorry but I lost the point of the post.

It all has to do with the cost to find the E-mails. The County could and should with all due diligence find the requested info and when that is completed a bill should be sent for the cost to the taxpayer to locate the information. Not only would that prevent the lawsuit, it will also give an employee a pay check. Sorry I did not make it clearer.

 

[Alicia Leonard]

I knew this thread reminded me of something........... excuse the source and read the content of the link. I think it explains a lot about what goes into public records request when they get big.
Want Palin's e-mails? That'll be $15 million

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27228287/

 

[wrobert]

It all has to do with the cost to find the E-mails. The County could and should with all due diligence find the requested info and when that is completed a bill should be sent for the cost to the taxpayer to locate the information. Not only would that prevent the lawsuit, it will also give an employee a pay check. Sorry I did not make it clearer.

Yes. Sometimes it is cheaper to just hire someone to come and peruse the records themselves. This issue has gotten a lot of interest from local government agencies, especially smaller ones on records retention, search capability, things of that nature. There are a lot of solutions available that I am finding that are surprisingly cheap even for the massive amount of space required. And these companies have some really good archiving programs. I have a google mailbox with 3 years of email and attachments that currently is only 4 gigs of space. Now I do delete quite a bit of stuff that I do not need, but from what I can tell from a program I am using I would only need about 5 gig a year to store ALL of my email in a redundant searchable cloud. This would run about $100 a year. So $40K annually may not be that bad of an investment to cover email backup and searchability. And I am sure could be had for less dollars on such a large purchase.


BTW, Florida Supreme Court has held that a search must take more than 15 minutes to fall under the extensive use of technology provision in a case brought against the Department of Corrections. That has pretty much turned into the standard.

 

[scooterbug44]

Why would it cost so much to save emails?

All you do is save a copy before deleting it - it isn't rocket science and most businesses already do it - and are saving emails/files with much more info in them.

 

[wrobert]

Why would it cost so much to save emails?

All you do is save a copy before deleting it - it isn't rocket science and most businesses already do it - and are saving emails/files with much more info in them.

And how do you propose gathering the records across multiple computers, including attachments, when someone asks you for every public record with the word beach in it? And how do you back up that data because you are legally bound to have a copy, crashed hard drive is a personal problem. And what do you do as employees come and go, where do you store their emails? Retention time depends on what the subject was. And what happens when someone says something in a public record then goes and deletes because they changed their mind from their own archive? Where do you find it?

 

[beachmouse]

You can store a pretty serious e-mail archive on a two terabyte hard drive that goes for less than $500 these days. My employer has no problem comprehensively archiving all employee e-mail for 400+ current employees and any number of former employees. (Though granted a massive Sunshine law request is no fun for the person/people responsible for pulling and compiling those e-mails)

 

[TechPyle]

. So $40K annually may not be that bad of an investment to cover email backup and searchability. And I am sure could be had for less dollars on such a large purchase.

Robert,
$40K a year increasing every year is not a bad price for the service but when thier is a $7.5 million dollar shortfall in revenue getting $40K might be a little difficult.

 

[Andy A]

I like the -$500 mentioned by BM. Private enterprise triumphs once again. Why doesn't the right hand of government look the see what the left hand of private enterprise is doing more often. It would seem a lot of financial problems could be solved.

 

[scooterbug44]

I also find it hard to believe that Walton County is the first (or only) government office being required to save emails. :roll:

 

[TechPyle]

I like the -$500 mentioned by BM. Private enterprise triumphs once again. Why doesn't the right hand of government look the see what the left hand of private enterprise is doing more often. It would seem a lot of financial problems could be solved.

Unfortunatly the $500 solution will not work. Using this just creates a simple backup of the e-mail system. This gives a one time snapshot of the system when the backup is run and is normally overwritten when the backup is run again or as changes are made. What this requires is the saving a permanent archiving of all e-mail sent to or from the county entity. This requires working from the mail server at the county. This system would need to never lose data never delete e-mail or files, never alow the removal of files or data, allow the searching and retrieval of files and be off site (not in Walton County). This would be a private sector solution one that would have to be bought and paid for by County Funds meaning tax dollars. The $500 external hard drive will not do this. More than likely for simple backups the county already has servers assigned for performing this task on a daily basis.