House Speaker Byrd's aide purged hundreds of messages in the final days of the legislative session.
By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published May 13, 2004
TALLAHASSEE - House Speaker Johnnie Byrd's top aide deleted hundreds of e-mails in the last two days of the legislative session, a practice questioned by a leading open records advocate and the next speaker of the House.
Chief of staff P.K. Jameson, a lawyer and the most powerful staff member in the House, said she routinely deletes e-mails, sometimes from her computer at home, because she does not consider them public record.
"I don't keep my e-mails ever because I get such a large volume of them every day during the session," Jameson said Wednesday. "The kind of stuff that was in there was a lot of "please hear this bill' kind of stuff, and after session, those are of no value."
The deletions became known when the St. Petersburg Times requested all e-mails received by Jameson and Byrd on the session's final two days, April 29 and 30, when the House did most of its most important work, passing or defeating dozens of major bills.
Some lawmakers were so desperate to get their bills on the calendar they fired off e-mails to the speaker's office. Hundreds of Floridians sent e-mails on many issues.
More than 1,000 e-mails were retrieved from Byrd's computer, but Jameson had none. She deleted all of them by May 1, the day after the session ended.
"It's unbelievable," said Barbara Petersen of the First Amendment Foundation. "I think it's a violation of law."
The probable next House speaker, Republican Allan Bense of Panama City, also questioned the practice. "If it was intentional, I have some real problems with it," Bense said.
Jameson said the e-mail she receives is "transitory" communication, such as confirming a meeting, or messages copied to her that also went to others.
Florida has some of the nation's strongest public records laws, and the growing use of e-mail has raised questions about how such messages should be kept.
The state Attorney General's Office routinely archives all business-related e-mail, Assistant Attorney General Pat Gleason said.
The attorney general issued an opinion in 2001 that said e-mail communication was public record under state law. In 1995, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that official e-mail should be treated like other forms of official communication and that content should determine whether it's a public record.
House rules require keeping records of "vital, permanent or archival value." But records of no "administrative, legal, or fiscal significance" need not be kept.
Jameson said she believed her e-mails were in the latter category.
The House policy is to follow a 1995 memorandum from the Department of State, the agency responsible for retaining records.
"Some e-mail messages are public records," that policy states. "Other messages are not."
The agency recommended that e-mails that are public record be printed and filed, or kept on a magnetic disk or hard drive.
Byrd's spokesman, Tom Denham, said backup copies of Jameson's e-mails did not exist.
- Times staff writer Lucy Morgan contributed to this report.
