Statement of Rick Thames, editor, The Charlotte Observer,
and president-elect, North Carolina Press Association,
to North Carolina E-Mail Records Review Panel

The preservation of government emails as public records

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you about the important issue being addressed by this commission.

My name is Rick Thames. I am the editor of The Charlotte Observer and president-elect of the North Carolina Press Association. The press association represents more than 200 community and daily newspapers across the state.

Already, many of those newspapers have contacted the association to register their great alarm over a policy that allows the destruction of e-mails that were exchanged in conducting public business.

When I became a reporter 30 years ago, my first assignment was to station myself in the lobby of a post office for reaction to the new price of stamps. People were outraged. Someone at the Postal Service has lost their mind and raised the cost to 15 cents.

I won’t ask for a show of hands from those who can quote the current price for a stamp (41 cents). But I suspect that many here would guess wrong - and not just because the cost of stamps keeps rising.

They’d guess wrong because they don’t use many stamps anymore.

I bought a book of those “forever” stamps last year, and they are still in my desk, living up to their name.

Oh, but I do send out mail. E-mail. In fact, I send out more e-mail now than I ever did when it was all about paper. I also get more mail. Scores of e-mail messages a day.

Now, some of these e-mails come and go in neat letterhead packages. They look a lot like traditional letters, memos and documents. A notary would be pleased with their official tone and appearance.

But other e-mails don’t look this way at all. They arrive as sentence fragments. And they can only truly be understood when matched up with other fragments from a continuing e-mail conversation.

A lot of e-mails to and from state employees also look this way. A scrap here, a scrap there, and in no time at all you have a complete picture of vital government business that - not long ago - came in the form of a letter or a memo.

Make no mistake. Every single e-mail involving state employees and elected officials is a public record. And because of that, all of these e-mails must be preserved.

Any policy that allows the selective destruction of e-mails is in blatant violation of our state’s open records law. It also offends the principle of open government that our state cherishes. No individual can decide what is and isn’t of “lasting value.” The people of North Carolina will decide the value of that public record.

Let me give you an example of how important that public record can be.

Last year, the owner of Lowes Motor Speedway announced that Gov. Mike Easley had committed the state to $20 million in incentives to keep the speedway in Concord.

Easley’s staff has since said that he made no such pledge. It said the governor only agreed to complete road improvements the state already had planned.

Our reporters asked Easley’s office for all e-mails related to this negotiation. Surely, Easley or his aides checked with someone in our state government for advice before deciding how to respond to the speedway.

But our request for e-mails turned up nothing. Easley’s office said it found nothing between administration officials anywhere.

Is that because there were no e-mails?  Or is it because these public officials, following the flawed e-mail policies of the Department of Cultural Resources, destroyed them after deciding that they were of little or no value?

Because this policy exists, we will never know for certain.

But if there was e-mail, I’d say that it was a public record worth preserving.

Mr. Chairman, you and others have expressed concern for the burden that this places on government, in terms of both time and money. I have heard this concern expressed many times over the years in connection with keeping public records.

It does take time and money to maintain public records. It always has. But the law, thankfully, makes no allowances for that. If it did, we wouldn’t have half the public records we have now.

Cost and inconvenience cannot be a factor. A public record must be preserved, period.

That said, I believe I have some good news about costs. The preservation of e-mail may not be nearly as expensive as some have imagined.

I asked the IT director for McClatchy Newspapers in the Carolinas to evaluate the state’s situation.

He believes your answer is to purchase one of a number of versions of e-mail archive software now available. Any one of them will enable the custodians of these public records to keep all e-mails and easily find them when needed.

At the Observer, we recently priced several such archives. One vendor offered to archive our 1,200 mailboxes at $50 per mailbox.

I am sure this vendor would charge the state less, given the larger scale of the project. But even if it didn’t, the cost of this archive to the state would be roughly $3 million.

Now, it appears that another vendor we checked on could provide the state a solution for as little as $120,000 a year. That system would handle every e-mail sent or received by the state. And we applied retail prices.

I suggest that the state open bidding for an e-mail archive to determine for itself which archive will provide North Carolina the best solution.

But the point I want to leave with you is this: There are solutions. I urge you to find one that will quickly bring our state government back into compliance with its own laws.

Thank you for your time and I welcome any questions you might have.