The Hennepin County Sheriff's Office has launched a new policy of deleting its e-mails after just 30 days, raising concerns over what some view as shrinking transparency and the destruction of public data.
Until Sept. 1, when the Sheriff's Office changed the policy, its e-mails had been kept indefinitely.
"I'm definitely troubled by it," said Tony Webster, a self-employed Minneapolis software engineer who has fought the Sheriff's Office for e-mail records. "More and more, government just wants to limit their exposure and just deleting stuff is one way. This is just going to keep happening."
The Sheriff's Office change serves to usher in a countywide policy, by administrative order starting in 2017, under which the remainder of Hennepin County e-mails will be automatically deleted after six months. From the county attorney's office to the County Board, departments will gradually implement the new policy starting Jan. 1.
Up to now the county, which officials say has 210 million e-mails in its accounts and gets 6 million more every month, has also kept e-mails indefinitely.
County leaders said that the policy change, announced to staffers on Tuesday, will save $2 million next year in e-mail storage and help the state's most populous county manage a growing mass of e-mails by deleting unnecessary ones and keeping only those deemed needed for the official record.
St. Paul similarly changed its policy in 2015 when it reduced the period it kept e-mails from three years to six months, a period that some said was too short. In Carver County, e-mails are kept for six years, while Anoka County's e-mails are deleted after three months. In Ramsey County, there's no policy on e-mail retention, but correspondence between departments is kept for three years.
"We really are afraid of what's going on," said Don Gemberling, spokesman for the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information. "It's bad public policy. Across the country, when you give public employees the ability to [delete their own e-mails], they get rid of stuff that's embarrassing."