Representatives of North Carolina's newspapers and broadcasters Thursday told a panel appointed by Gov. Mike Easley that state law requires government officials to retain copies of all e-mail messages pertaining to public business.

"Every single e-mail involving state employees and elected officials is a public record," said Rick Thames, editor of The Charlotte Observer and president-elect of the N.C. Press Association. "And because of that, all of these e-mails must be preserved. Any policy that allows the destruction of e-mails is in blatant violation of the state's open records law."

Easley created the committee, which held a public hearing Thursday. The hearing came in the wake of allegations from former Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Debbie Crane that officials in the governor's press office instructed employees to delete certain e-mail messages in an effort to subvert the state's public records law.

The law makes no distinction between electronic and paper documents. A policy enacted in 2002 gives individual state employees discretion to delete messages they deem to have no further "administrative value."

Dana Cope, executive director of the State Employees Association of North Carolina, said the policy is too vague and needs to provide workers with more clarity about how to follow the law.

"We do not wish to be put into a situation that would compromise the public's interest with information requests and potential political pressure from the administration that could result in termination of employment, as we all know with the recent dismissal of Ms. Debbie Crane at DHHS," Cope said.

He then suggested that Easley's press aides were not the only ones who should be answering questions about deleted e-mail.

The employees association sued State Treasurer Richard Moore in February over access to records detailing who has been hired to manage the state retirement fund, which Moore oversees.

At the hearing Thursday, Cope held up a printed copy of an e-mail exchange in February 2007 between Sara Lang, Moore's communications director, and a reporter for Forbes magazine. The business publication was then working on an article about Moore's acceptance of campaign donations from people doing business with the retirement fund.

Lang's answers to the reporter's questions appear to be missing in one message. Cope said when the employees association asked whether messages had been deleted, Moore's lawyer responded in a letter, "The department provided all e-mails in its possession."

"No one can seem to find the e-mail with the answers," Cope said. "Were they destroyed? Were they misplaced? Or was it the proverbial animated dog that ate them? We don't know."

Lang, in an e-mail message, declined to comment because the matter is involved in litigation.

Members of the e-mail panel -- composed of state officials, a city attorney and former journalists -- questioned those who spoke about whether spam messages were public records and whether taxpayers should bear the cost of archiving the more than 1 million messages state employees send and receive each day.

Thames said the cost was likely not as high as some had suggested, and said the state should seek bids for a computer system to do the work. "There are solutions," Thames said.

Mark Prak, a lawyer for the N.C. Association of Broadcasters, urged the committee to have what he termed a "can-do attitude." He said it would likely be cheaper to automatically retain all e-mail messages than to train every state employee to properly interpret the law.

Last year, 610 state employees attended voluntary workshops on public records offered by the state Department of Cultural Resources. At that rate, it would take at least a century to educate the more than 62,000 executive branch employees with state e-mail accounts.

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