MN GOP lawmakers urge Gov. Walz to stop DHS plans to delete emails after a year

A group of Republican lawmakers are asking Gov. Tim Walz to intervene with plans the Minnesota Department of Human Services has to begin automatically deleting emails after a year unless workers decide the messages contain official records.

“This move will leave citizens, legislators, and auditors with significantly less information about the work of the Department and its interactions with Minnesotans,” Sens. Mark Koran, R- North Branch, Warren Limmer, R- Maple Grove, and Paul Utke, R-Park Rapids, said in a statement.

Koran serves as the cochair of the Legislative Audit Commission, an oversight group, Limmer is on the Data Practices Commission, which oversees public records compliance, and Utke is the top Republican on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

“Rather than value transparency and accountability with a robust retention policy that protects personal privacy, the department is taking the cheap and easy way out with risky, automated deletion,” the statement said, noting Gov. Walz’s campaign promised to keep government transparent.

The governor’s office and Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Leaders in the Senate did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. House Speaker Melissa Horman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, declined to comment.

Last week, Rep. Peggy Scott, R-Andover, expressed similar frustration with the new policy calling it a “shocking” change of standards without legislative input. She said transparency should not be a partisan issue.

“Lowering these standards will make it harder to hold programs and the bureaucrats who administer them accountable,” Scott said in a statement.

DHS statement

In a statement, a Department of Human Services spokesman said the policy was needed to ensure workers’ email boxes did not become repositories for “large volumes of private data” that are difficult to manage and at risk of a data breach. The agency directly serves more than 1.5 million Minnesotans and has a lot of their personal health and financial information.

“DHS has an obligation to safeguard this information and must store official records contained within emails consistent with record retention schedules and in appropriate secure locations,” the statement said.

The agency is poised to begin implementing the new policy Aug. 7 and have it fully in place this fall. State officials say supervisors will train and guide workers through the process in order to ensure official records are maintained.

Previously, a spokesman said the policy was similar to those already being used at other government agencies.

A budget of more than $10 billion

The department is one of the state’s largest with an annual budget of more than $10 billion. It has also had a history of oversight and compliances problems.

Open government advocates say eliminating messages so quickly will further limit the public’s understand of the agency operations.

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Records advocates say state agencies are working with a flawed interpretation of the state’s open records law, officially called the Data Practices Act. State officials claim emails are not official government records unless they contain specific types of information.

It’s a growing interpretation among state and local government agencies, which are automatically deleting email and other messages at rates similar to or even quicker than what the state Department of Human Services plans.

Government transparency issues

Don Gemberling, spokesman for the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information, said he believes state officials are relying on a state Supreme Court case from 1968 for their interpretation that email doesn’t necessarily constitute an official government record. I

In the case, involving the notes of a property assessor, the court found “official actions are different from thought processes” and government only need to keep “information pertaining to an official decision, and not information relating to the process by which such a decision was reached.”

Gemberling said it was a positive step forward to have a bipartisan group of lawmakers raising concerns about the change. Last month, Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, said the move to delete messages so quickly was troubling and not in the spirit of government transparency.

When Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office was asked in mid-July about the merits of not treating email as official records a spokesman said each agency was the best judge of what needed to be kept.

The spokesman said he was not aware of “any specific or blanket recommendation from our office to state agencies regarding email retention policies.” However, if there was such advice it would be considered a secret “attorney-client privileged communication.”

Not all government officials are subject to the state’s Data Practices Act. The state Legislature is largely exempt from the open records law.