City Attorney Wade Hinton proposed a new policy for the retention and disposition of city records at Tuesday afternoon’s City Council meeting.
“Unfortunately we have had a culture of ‘Keep Everything,’” Attorney Hinton stated, referring to the city documents that have been “floating” around since the 1980s. “The unfortunate thing is that we keep these documents all over…and they also take up a lot of space for storage in the electronic format as well.”
Attorney Hinton stated the conditions in which the city keeps these records are abysmal. “There was one particular place when you had to wear certain types of equipment because it was a hazardous environment,” he said.
Members of the Records and Information Management team have met with several departments over the past year to address the issue of “Keep Everything.” The goal for the new policy is to end the “Keep Everything” culture and become proactive about the retention and disposition of city information.
Team member Shannon Harmon stated the first step in implementing this new policy, if adopted by the City Council, is to create a new RIM team that will be responsible for reviewing the requests for disposition that will happen at least once a year. The team will be trained on record disposition in order to figure out what documents need to be kept, where they should be stored, for how long, and why.
Open Records Specialist Janina Muller stated the second phase in the strategy is to enlist the guidance of a certified records manager and consultant for best practices.
Councilman Yusuf Hakeem questioned if this process was critical to the city at this time.
Attorney Hinton stated this process is critical because it will allow the city to know with absolute certainty what documents the city has and where the documents are located.
If the new policy is approved, disposition of city records will be scheduled to begin in February.