Tontitown looks to begin purging email

TONTITOWN -- Tontitown aldermen are considering a change in the city's policy of keeping email indefinitely and using a different company for website and email service.

Several Northwest Arkansas cities, including Springdale and Elm Springs, keep email messages 30 to 90 days before purging them. Tontitown has kept email between city officials indefinitely for years, but Alderman Rhonda Doudna said that is unnecessary and expensive.

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Global Relay Communications is the leading provider of cloud-based electronic message archiving, supervision, and e-Discovery solutions for the global financial sector. The company has 18,000 customers in 90 countries. Global Relay Archive securely captures and preserves email, instant messaging, mobile messaging, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and more with Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Android, Outlook and Web access.

Source: Globalrelay.com

State law does not mandate a city keep email a minimum amount of time. It's up to policies enacted by each city, said Don Zimmerman, executive director of the Arkansas Municipal League. Some cities choose to keep their e-records longer than others, he said.

Tontitown has used Global Relay, an information technology hosting company, since 2009, according to Alicia Collins, recorder-treasurer. Doudna repeatedly has talked about leaving Global Relay or changing the policy and keeping the system. She said it may take time, but she wants to drop the company and replace it with something cheaper. Collins said the service costs about $635 a month.

"Nobody in Northwest Arkansas uses it," Doudna said. "Why do we need to use it?"

Tontitown also needs to stop keeping email as long as it does, Doudna said. She said ideally the city would keep its email for Freedom of Information Act requests 30 days.

"It's just not necessary to have it," Doudna said. The issue was tabled Tuesday during a Tontitown Committee of the Whole meeting, but it is expected to come back up. Alderman Joe Edgmon hopes to have a company endorsed by the Arkansas Municipal League make a presentation during the next City Council meeting Feb. 3.

Edgmon said he is worried about any change to the city's policy of keeping its email. The city could find itself without records needed to make a good defense by cutting back on how long it keeps email, Edgmon said. Purging email in 30 days also looks bad for the new government, he said.

"Transparency -- it's all about good government," Edgmon said. "I think a city can get into trouble; that's what I think."

Doudna said anything important could be printed out and saved.

Aldermen have talked for weeks about how to cut the city's budget, increase revenue or save money. Mayor Paul Colvin said the city faces a shortfall if nothing is changed. Edgmon said the city needs to cut about $300,000 from this year's budget.

Aldermen have held two meetings to comb through the budget this month.

Doudna said ditching Global Relay and cutting back on unneeded records may save money.

Elm Springs, which purges every 30 days, uses GoDaddy.com, a website hosting company, to build and maintain its own website and email, said Jason Hiatt, police chief and the person who does information technology services for the city. Elm Springs pays $125 a year for hosting its website, Hiatt said.

That option wouldn't work for larger cities such as Springdale, which handles about 350,000 email messages per year, said Mark Gutte, director of the information technology department. The city has roughly 450 email accounts and hosts everything in-house, he said. Email messages are retained 90 days, but the city doesn't force employees to delete either, Gutte said.

Springdale's in-house server is very affordable with renewal costs of about $3,800 per year, Gutte said.

It's more efficient for cities with 50 to 100 mailboxes to operate their own system, Gutte said.

Fayetteville doesn't have an email retention policy, but memory space limits how much email can be kept, said Don Marr, chief of staff. The city does have a record retention policy, not related to email, maintained by the city clerk, Marr said.

Employees delete their own email messages as they are done with them, Marr said. If a document is important to government operations or activities and needs retained, employees can save those email, he said. Some accounts have email going back years, Marr said.

"We want to be as open and transparent as possible," Marr said. "We would err on the side of retaining something rather than deleting it."

Collins said Tontitown's system helps employees process Freedom of Information Act requests and to review and redact email. This year, the city fielded 14 information requests Jan. 1-20, according to e-documents via an online link by Collins. The city received about 39 requests for information last year, digital records show.

"It is a very helpful tool, and it takes a lot of unnecessary time off our work load," Collins said.

Scarlet Sims can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWAScarlets.

NW News on 01/26/2015

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