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Committee hears wide testimony on House File 428 to standardize correspondence retention; bill laid over for fiscal review
Summary
House File 428, proposing a standardized retention period for government correspondence, drew broad testimony from government attorneys, auditors, open‑government advocates and environmental groups. Committee members agreed to lay the bill over pending fiscal notes and further work on definitions and costs.
Chair Scott presented House File 428, saying the bill updates the definition of government correspondence to reflect electronic communications and would create a retention requirement intended to make records available for public oversight. “Some government entities are only keeping email correspondence for 30 to 60 days,” the chair said, and the bill seeks consistency across agencies.
Witnesses who supported standardizing retention described cases where missing correspondence impeded public oversight. Matt Ealing of Minnesotans for Open Government cited email exchanges that obscured the identity of a data‑center project proponent and communications around a managed‑care report the public had been told was independent; he called standardized retention “important” to understand how decisions were made. Legislative Auditor Judy Randall told the committee she reviews records retention schedules and said the absence of a statutory standard makes it difficult to deny agency requests for short retention periods such as 60 days.
Local government counsel and administrators raised practical concerns. Rebecca Holshue, assistant Hennepin County attorney, warned that the bill's proposed definition of “correspondence” could sweep in both official records and routine, non‑official messages, creating “an extraordinary burden” to store and manage every email, chat and text. She told the committee the county already holds tens of millions of emails and processes about 3 million chat messages a month; the bill could slow responses to records requests and increase data‑breach risk.
Environmental advocates including the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and Water Legacy urged stronger retention standards, citing past court cases in which missing agency documents affected permit decisions. Several testifiers described agency messaging and auto‑delete policies begun during the COVID‑era use of Microsoft Teams; one witness cited a 2020 agency notice that individual and group chats were set to auto‑delete after one day and team channel posts after 14 days.
Committee members asked about definitions of personal versus official correspondence, the administrative cost to local governments, and safeguards against using public‑records requests as strategic litigation tools. Representative Finke and others asked how the bill would treat purely personal messages, and Representative Mahler raised concerns about local government costs and about requesters using data requests “as a sword rather than a shield.”
Chair Scott said the committee will lay the bill over to receive fiscal notes and work with stakeholders on definitions and operational questions. The committee adjourned with House File 428 pending further consideration.
