Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Records Retention topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Grant County work session favors a cautious 3-year email retention baseline and a ‘move-slow’ approach to AI
Summary
County legal and technology advisors recommended a default 36-month email retention policy and urged training and a departmental survey before adopting AI tools, citing discovery costs and the difficulty of removing data once ingested by learning models.
Collective legal counsel told the Grant County Board of Commissioners during a work session that the county and some peer jurisdictions have adopted a three-year baseline for retaining email and other electronic correspondence, and recommended the board consider a similar minimum retention period and supporting procedures.
Counsel said the county’s archiver can be configured to preserve all email for a governing-period and to purge older records automatically once a retention policy is adopted. He cautioned, however, that some records are subject to longer statutory or policy-required retention and must be stored in longer-lived repositories, such as file servers, rather than treated the same as routine email. “There is no mandate or law that mandates it gets kept in email,” he said, noting that certain documents “must be kept longer than three years.”
Commissioners and staff pressed for practical clarity about the interplay between desktop file saves, local device backups and archived copies. Counsel answered that deleting an email does not necessarily eliminate it from an archiver and warned that saving ‘‘everything’’ to user desktops or servers can substantially increase the cost and scope of any future public-records discovery. The county’s archiver, he said, reduces exposure by ensuring records are retained in a single, searchable store for the period set by the governing body.
The discussion then shifted to artificial intelligence (AI). Sean, who presented on behalf of the technology committee, told the board that AI is already embedded in many applications in county operations and urged caution. “Once data goes in, it’s very difficult to get it out,” he said, adding that departments differ markedly on what they consider sensitive information. He recommended polling every department to determine where AI is in use and what guardrails are in place before adopting a countywide AI policy.
Board members asked for an immediate training plan and for the technology committee to return with a draft policy and department responses. Staff said they would bring a formal draft retention policy and schedule training tailored for commissioners and department heads.
The board did not adopt a retention or AI policy at the session; staff were directed to continue working with the technology committee and to return with recommendations and training plans for future board action.
