Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Twenty

Matt Blunt and his crew seem to have an incredibly difficult time getting their heads around this whole record retention thing.  Not only have they obviously given very light regard to what is currently required of them by existing records retention schedules, but their disingenuous "solution" to the problem is itself violative of the records retention policy.

On Thursday, Matt Blunt announced his reactionary "plan" --the creation of a "system" by which every single email coming into or going out of state government would be retained and archived.  Blunt's offered rationale is that such a system would prevent "confusion" over which records to save, though only Matt Blunt's office has suffered any such confusion to this point, leading to their destruction of memoranda containing legal advice that clearly constitutes state business. 

­In other words, because Matt Blunt and his inner circle are either too daft or too corrupt to figure out that legal memoranda are state records that need to be saved, every email from every state employee must be saved from here forward, at great expense to the Missouri taxpayer.

But this is just another illustration of how little Team Blunt understands the law on record retention.  His plan to save every email also runs counter to the state's policy on how records are retained. 

Consider the following records scheduling procedures approved by the State Records Commission to be followed by state agencies in making determinations about record retention (emphasis mine):

5. Retention periods represent the minimum time records must be held after cutoff. Disposition action should normally be taken promptly after the retention period has been met. However, an agency should suspend the disposition of records that have met their retention period if the records are involved in a current or anticipated litigation, audit, or regulatory action, or the agency has other ongoing use for the records.

6. For effective management, retention periods should be established as short as possible to meet expected business needs, in order to promptly eliminate useless materials and minimize records storage costs. Retention periods can be amended by contacting RMD to ask for a reappraisal if experience shows they are either too long or too short.

7. Most records are temporary, and will be destroyed when they no longer have any administrative, legal, or fiscal value. Maximum use of recycling is encouraged.

To put it simply, just as the state's requirements for record retention do not allow all documents to be summarily destroyed, neither do they anticipate the retention and storage of every single document that is generated by state government.  Just as his earlier actions contravened the precepts regarding summary deletion of records, Matt Blunt's new plan clearly demonstrates a disregard for the second precept --that Missourians should not to pay to hold forever onto documents that have no purpose, meaning or value as archival records.

Matt Blunt's half-cooked plan is merely a mechanism through which he seeks to pawn off responsibility for his own administration's lawbreaking on record retention.  He ignores the fact that there are clear principles in place to guide state bodies in making decisions, suggesting that the current necessity to distinguish between records and non-records is just too "confusing" for a simple man like him to honor.  He is performing his naif routine in hopes of slipping the saddle of responsibility for what he has already done.  It is an unconvincing act.

Anyone who thinks that the Governor of our state has a responsibility to the office to utilize judgment and discretion should reject the theory advanced by Blunt with his new plan.  Governors before Blunt and governors after Blunt have been and will be skilled enough to make reliable determinations about what are or are not records in need of retention.  Because Matt Blunt does not possess that skill does not mean that we should lower our expectations of a proud office and incur needless new costs in the process.
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