From the perspective of Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s office, retaining thousands of e-mail messages is a waste of disk space and an example of inefficient government. Others see the deletion of these public records as the work of a governor who wants to operate in secrecy, according to a story by my colleagues Pat Doyle and Mark Brunswick.

Journalists obviously have a dog in this fight. We are unabashedly biased in favor of public records. Internal meetings of government agencies are not covered by open meetings laws. No one is legally required to talk to us. For those reasons, public records have often been the only window into the workings of government agencies and bureaucrats who have maintained, as so many do these days, a policy of silence.

For their story, Doyle and Brunswick requested nearly a year’s worth of emails from Pawlenty’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff. We’ll never know what was destroyed, but as they reported, no “correspondence about key legislative issues or budget negotiations was included…” Instead, there were letters like these - perhaps of interest if historians someday want to know what sorts of keepsakes were sent to Pawlenty’s office. Those were among 115 copies provided to the Star Tribune, along with a bill for $299.43.

For a comparison, Doyle and Brunswick looked at Gov. Jesse Ventura’s documents that have been collected at the Minnesota State Archives. Here’s what they wrote:

Ventura … preserved a broad array of memos, e-mails and other documents that revealed the friction and internal debate over controversial issues preceding a final decision.

And records of a 2001 dispute over tribal casino audits includes this cryptic note about former Attorney General Mike Hatch, who wanted to make the audits public. “Due to the [state employees] strike and the terrorist situation, now is not the time the governor wants to take on Hatch…”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Public records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.