RALEIGH - State employees routinely trash millions of potential public records, according to presentations given at the first meeting of a committee appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to review his administration's policies for retaining e-mails.

The state's public records law makes no distinction between e-mails and other types of documents that the government is required to retain and provide to the public. George Bakolia, the chief of computer services for the Easley administration, told the committee Thursday that about 95 percent of e-mails sent to state employees are sorted out by spam-blocking software.

What remains is about 884,000 incoming e-mails delivered to the computers of executive branch employees with e-mail accounts. That figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of e-mails the 62,100 state employees send to each other daily or send to non-government addresses.

Each employee is allotted digital memory on state servers and mainframe computers. Every month they are sent an e-mail reminding them to purge messages they no longer need.

The administration's policy gives its employees authority to delete messages that are deemed to have no “administrative value” to the employee or their department.

“It’s good, effective management,” Bakolia said of the practice. “They [the employees] are the best ones to determine that, not us.”

However, the policy appears to give little weight to contemplating whether the messages employees decide are worthless may be of value to the public. There is no consistent effort across state government to train employees on the state's public records law, though employees can seek guidance by reading policies posted on the Internet.

In addition they are not uniformly instructed on how to save e-mail messages on their computer hard drives or other storage media when asked to delete messages from the central server. The nine committee members, all appointed by the governor, asked few questions during the nearly two-hour meeting.

A large portion of time was spent coordinating when the members' busy schedules would allow them to meet again to produce a report back to Easley by a May 20 deadline. A public hearing on the issue of e-mail retention was scheduled for April 3 at 9:30 a.m. in the Administration Building on Jones Street in Raleigh.

Franklin Freeman, Easley's senior assistant for government affairs and hand-picked chairman of the committee, said that people who want to speak at the public hearing should not try to send him e-mail to reserve a slot.

“My children are besides themselves with laughter because I don't even know how to cut a computer on,” Freeman said of the reaction at his home after Easley picked him to chair the committee. “I do not communicate by e-mail. I receive it. I have an e-mail address to receive it, but I'm still one of the old-fashioned folks that communicates by telephone or face to face.”

Those who want to speak can sign up when they arrive, or register in advance by calling Freeman at 733-6184.

They can also e-mail committee member Liz Riley, Easley's deputy legal counsel, at liz.riley@ncmail.net.

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