City Under Fire for Deleting Emails

The Inland Empire city of Colton is taking heat from a pair of local businessmen who are challenging the city's policy of deleting emails after 30 days.  The Press Enterprise has the story here.

It seems Colton is desirous of discretion in this regard, as emails were leaked soem time ago in which the City Manager made some embarrasing characterizations of city chamber members ("Chamber Monkeys") and another high ranking employee described one citizen's group as "urban idiots."

Here we say again: think before you hit send.

Update: Thanks to CCN reader P.W. for writing in with a clarification.  An earlier version of this post noted that the complaintants in this case were arguing that Colton was in violation of the public records act.  Our reader, who knows a thign or two in this regard, noted "The Public Records Act does not contain any requirement that agencies keep emails or any other record. The record retention requirement is contained in a separate part of the Government Code from the PRA. The records retention statute contains a default requirement that records be kept for two years. It also requires certain enumerated records to be kept in perpetuity. But except for the enumerated records, it is left to the agencies to decide which documents are records that are to be retained and which are not."