SUNSHINE WEEK AND GOV CUOMO\u2019S 90-DAY EMAIL DELETION POLICY<\/p>\n
Sunday\u00a0marks the beginning of “Sunshine Week” a week in which the nation focuses its attention on government openness.\u00a0 The “Week” makes it clear that it is important to maintain an open government, in order to ensure the proper relationship between public officials and the citizens they are pledged to serve.<\/p>\n
The critical tool for holding policymakers accountable, as well as ensuring that the public is educated on policymaking, is the Freedom of Information Law.\u00a0 The Law operates on one basic concept \u2013 that government information should be accessible to the public.\u00a0 Without a strong open access law, it is virtually impossible for the public to adequately participate in, and monitor, governmental decision making.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, in Albany, a very dark cloud persists: The Cuomo Administration\u2019s policy of requiring the elimination of emails after 90 days.<\/p>\n
At first, the governor\u2019s office argued that the policy was simply due to technological limitations.\u00a0 When faced with the fact that the federal government \u2013 which has far more emails than New York \u2013 now has a seven year retention policy, the justification has changed.<\/p>\n
Now the governor\u2019s office is saying that the policy is something that it inherited.\u00a0 But that is untrue as well.\u00a0 \u00a0According to internal memoranda, the Administration was describing the policy as something that has been adopted in 2013.\u00a0 For example, in a Department of State memo the agency stated that the “90-day email retention policy wasadopted by the State in June 2013.”<\/p>\n
Now, the governor\u2019s office has begun to relent in the face of nonstop criticism of that policy.\u00a0 On Thursday, his office stated that the governor would begin discussions with other statewide officials and the Legislature to establish a one email policy for the entire government.<\/p>\n
But it is the governor who controls the overwhelming majority of New York\u2019s vast government.\u00a0 It is the governor that should lead by example by issuing an executive order\u00a0reversing<\/em> the 90 day email deletion policy and instead follow the lead of the federal government, which requires archiving of emails for seven (7) years.<\/p>\n Governor Cuomo should lead by example and he should act now.\u00a0 Waiting does nothing other than allow the continued destruction of emails.<\/p>\n In Albany, all too often the use of “negotiations” and “summits” are substitutes for action and hopes that the pressure to act will dissipate.<\/p>\n When Governor Cuomo took office, he made a big show of opening the second floor of the Capitol to public access.\u00a0\u00a0That was a symbolic act.\u00a0\u00a0The governor must use his executive powers to unilaterally spread sunshine throughout state government.\u00a0\u00a0Governor Cuomo can mark the beginning of “Sunshine Week” by reopening state government to the public it serves.\u00a0 He can do so with the mere stroke of the pen.<\/p>\n The focus on openness is important, not only for the central roles these programs have played, but in the larger debate over how to strengthen their protections.\u00a0 A constant review of Freedom of Information and Open Meetings laws is important, particularly since those laws were conceived in the 1970s when files were written on paper and kept in metal cabinets.\u00a0 It was a time well before anyone knew of the Internet, smart phones or google glasses.<\/p>\n Pledging to make New York\u2019s notoriously secretive state government more open has become a staple of promises by candidates for public office.\u00a0 In his campaign book, “Clean Up Albany” then-candidate Andrew Cuomo pledged “to make the State government the most transparent and accountable in history.”<\/p>\n It turns out that that pledge remains unfulfilled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SUNSHINE WEEK AND GOV CUOMO\u2019S 90-DAY EMAIL DELETION POLICY Sunday\u00a0marks the beginning of “Sunshine Week” a week in which the nation focuses its attention on government openness.\u00a0 The “Week” makes it clear that it is important to maintain an open government, in order to ensure the proper relationship between public officials and the citizens they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1440,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}