FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022

CONTACT:
MayorPress@sandiego.gov

SAN DIEGO Furthering his commitment to transparency, accountability and fiscal discipline, Mayor Todd Gloria today announced that he is proposing a new email-retention policy that would make San Diego one of the countrys most open with its email records.

Mayor Glorias proposal would require the City of San Diego to keep emails and make them available to the public for five years.

While some local governments have email-retention policies as short as 60 days, and many have used two years as the standard, this policy Im proposing for the City of San Diego to retain emails for five years demonstrates our commitment to transparency while also managing taxpayer dollars responsibly, Mayor Todd Gloria said. Im proud of the fact that, with the adoption of this policy, the City will have the longest e-mail retention policy and the State and nation.

The proposed five-year email-retention policy would cover the full term of any City elected official, plus one additional year. It also allows the City to follow industry best practices by defining a formal policy that balances its business requirements with the peoples right to access public documents. The policy would go into effect on Feb. 1, 2023.

Prior to developing the new policy, City staff met with representatives from the San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and a number of local print, broadcast and online media outlets to gather feedback on various email-retention options under consideration. The City also surveyed other large U.S. cities and local governments on their retention schedules. None was longer than five years.

Weve taken many steps to modernize City operations in recent years, and implementing an email-retention policy like every other public agency has done is long overdue, said Jay Goldstone, the Citys chief operating officer. We will continue to have one of the longest email-retention schedules in the country while saving taxpayer dollars and improving customer service.

The chart below shows the length of email-retention policies at other public agencies, based on a query from early 2021:

Adoption of a five-year email retention policy will improve response times to public records requests, reduce the time burden of email searches on City staff and resources, and eliminate operational costs and periodic procurement of email-archive solutions to replace obsolete systems. This change will save roughly $1.2 million over five years.

The City has dedicated a significant amount of time, resources, costs and technology solutions to maintain an indefinite email-retention policy in the past decades. City email archives go back to 2008 and, as the City relied more heavily on electronic communications in recent years, the management of an indefinite email-retention policy has stretched resources and become an increasing burden on operations.

The City accumulates about 90 million emails per year, and searches for California Public Records Act requests are becoming more challenging with the potential of going through hundreds of millions of emails. In addition, some individual employees have hit the Microsoft storage limit of 100 gigabytes, which can lead to email access being cut off and requiring cumbersome manual steps to resolve.

By implementing a five-year email retention policy,there will be a finite number of emails to search for and review for future PRA requests, which will helpreduce the time it takes to respond to PRAs and improve the customer service experience.

This change effectively puts a cap on the size of our email archive, which will become more manageable and easier to search through for public records requests, said Jonathan Behnke, the Citys Chief Information Officer. We view this as the next logical step in our efforts to modernize operations, providing a win-win situation for the public and the City as we improve response times to records requests while reducing costs and streamlining email system management and performance.

Under the proposed policy, emails that are official City records will continue to be preserved in accordance with the City Master Records Schedule,while non-records would be deleted after five years.Emails that are related to litigation will continue to be retained on legal hold in accordance with evidence preservation and legal and regulatory compliance.

The proposed policy will be presented to the City Councils Rules Committee at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 16.

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