Hitting the delete button

State employees routinely trash millions of potential public records, according to presentations given today at the first meeting of a committee appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to review his administration's policies for retaining e-mails.

The state's public records law makes no distinction between e-mails and other types of documents that the government is required to retain and provide to the public.

George Bakolia, the chief of computer services for the Easley administration, told the committee that state employees are sent about 5.5 million e-mails a day, reports Michael Biesecker.

About 95 percent of those e-mails are immediately "declared worthless" by two layers of spam-blocking software. The remaining 270,000 e-mails are delivered to the computers of the estimated 62,100 executive branch employees with e-mail accounts.

That figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of e-mails state employees send to each other daily or those that they address to people outside state government. Each employee is allotted a limited amount of digital memory on state servers and mainframe computers.

Read more after the jump.

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Every month they are sent an e-mail reminding them to purge messages they no longer need. The administration's policy gives its employees authority to delete messages that are deemed to have no "administrative value" to the employee or their department.

"It's good, effective management," Bakolia said of the practice. "They [the employees] are the best ones to determine that, not us."

However, the policy appears to give little weight to contemplating whether the messages employees deem worthless may be of potential value to the public.

State employees are not uniformly instructed on how to save e-mail messages on their computer hard drives or other storage media when asked to delete messages from the central server, Bakolia said.

The nine committee members, all appointed by the governor, asked few questions during the nearly two-hour meeting. A large portion of time was spent coordinating when the members' busy schedules would allow them to meet again to produce a report back to Easley by a May 20 deadline.