The Electronic Records Work Group — an interagency body that advises the State Libraries, Archives and Records Commission and the Commonwealth Office of Technology on electronic records — met today in a regular meeting to discuss, among other things, "Public Records on Personal Devices" in the wake of recent attorney general's open records decisions.

During last month's ERWG meeting — pictured below — a work group member raised the issue. The issue was tabled for today's meeting to allow members to review the attorney general's decisions.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5meDLCSbZFg

The minutes of the last ERWG meeting reflect that the attorney general's designate indicated that he could not "put forward more information." He offered to "put [the] group in contact with someone in his office to discuss it further for [the] next meeting."

No other member of the attorney general's staff — other than the same designate — participated in today's meeting. He stated that the open records decisions "speak for themselves."

A representative of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition — Amye Bensenhaver — attended the meeting to urge the ERWG, and the agency to which it is attached, the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, to adhere to well-established guidance on this settled legal matter.

ERWG chair and KDLA Electronic Records Manager, Derek Clark, declined to weigh in on the current legal debate. Nevertheless, he indicated that he would continue to train public officials and employees that they are responsible for managing and retaining records relating to public business regardless of whether the records originate on a private device.

This is the prudent course. It is one from which KDLA and the ERWG should not deviate in spite of three poorly reasoned decisions issued by the current attorney general — decisions that represent a dramatic departure from all but one now discredited 2015 open records decision.

https://www.facebook.com/419650175248377/posts/972201186659937/?d=n

The Kentucky Open Government Coalition will formally request, by letter, that KDLA and the Electronic Records Work Group hold the line on its decades long guidance — guidance which is supported by sound records management policy and grounded in the legislative recognition that records management and records access are "essentially related."

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=50009