All you wired city watchdogs and your persistent e-mailing to the city of Encinitas has prompted the city to create policy over what do with the sheer volume of electronic correspondence.
NCT.com Encinitas updating its e-mail policy
By: ADAM KAYE - Staff Writer
City to clarify what needs to be preserved as public record
ENCINITAS -- The e-mails arrive at City Hall by the thousands and city officials are examining which of them to keep and how to store them.
Earlier this week, the City Council agreed to appoint two of its members, Teresa Barth and James Bond, to a subcommittee to develop policies and procedures for e-mail. The committee will include the city manager, city clerk, city attorney and representatives from each city department.
Access to public records is protected by state law, but the proliferation of e-mail has outpaced legislation governing when to delete or preserve electronic records.
"We need to update our policy to reflect the constantly changing technology," Barth said. "You should always start with the assumption that all e-mails are public records, then determine what the exceptions are."
The city's record-retention policy sets a two-year limit to the keeping of printed records. An e-mail policy last revised in 2005 states e-mails must be stored if "keeping them is required by law."
The policy states e-mail is not a public record when a memo is intended for temporary use.
Employees must manage their own in-boxes and file memos in e-mail folders, on the city's computer network, or print and file the record where it belongs
Every day, the city's computer system automatically deletes e-mail that hasn't been filed and is more than 30 days old.
The random deletion of e-mail can be risky, a First Amendment expert said.
"There are certain, clear principles that need to be observed," said Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition. "If a communication to or from a government employee or a government official is about a government matter or government business, then it's a public record."
read the rest here.
I suggest that the city of Encinitas use Gmail, the free e-mail service provided by Google. Gmail stores all your e-mail forever, you never have to delete a single e-mail. My personal Gmail account currently has 6310 MB (and growing since Google is always growing their server farms). Gmail has an excellent spam filter so you don't have to deal with Nigerian money scams or viagra ads. My favorite feature is the search function. If I type "Dr. Lorri" into my Gmail search all her e-mails come up lickety split.
Google
note-The Encinitas city council has always been excellent about responding to my obnoxious e-mails.
Now watch this cool music video about interconnectedness:
Can you say Depression?
ReplyDeleteMoody’s says spending threatens US rating
By Francesco Guerrera, Aline van Duyn and Daniel Pimlott in New York
Published: January 10 2008 18:36 | Last updated: January 10 2008 18:36
The US is at risk of losing its top-notch triple-A credit rating within a decade unless it takes radical action to curb soaring healthcare and social security spending, Moody’s, the credit rating agency, said on Thursday.
The warning over the future of the triple-A rating – granted to US government debt since it was first assessed in 1917 – reflects growing concerns over the country’s ability to retain its financial and economic supremacy.
Its the end of the world as we know it
ReplyDeleteQuickly! Let's all get government jobs with the City. Have they ever had a layoff? Guaranteed employment with full retirement benefits. Their defined-benefit pension is a guaranteed gravy train unlike the business world's defined-contribution retirement plans.
ReplyDeleteI justa got my San Dieguito Water District notice telling me that since Jerome Stocks and all of his developer cronkies built 30% more homes in N. County and "we" are using so much water, they are going to charge me more money for each stage of water rationing they impose.
ReplyDeleteNow there is a direct cost for overdeveloping my county. The water rationing will begin sooner and I will pay a hell of alot more thanks to the overdevelopment supported by Jerome.
Thanks for costing me thousands of dollars Jerome!
Please tell Mayor Bond that if he ceases clicking on the spam email links to Viagra, penile enhancements, and long lost relatives' money from Nigeria, then those pesky emails will peter out.
ReplyDeleteI also got the notice from the SDWD about the increase in fees and rates. We can protest this. The city actually includes instructions on how to do this. They failed to do this with the last increase.
ReplyDeleteLast time I was the only person to send a protest letter. I included a copy of my Financial Flimflam essay to no avail. You need to include your parcel number. Get it off your property tax bill.
If the city gets enough objections (40% I think), they can't just shove this through. In reality this increase is a subsidy for developers and a way to get more money into the General Fund. We have those pesky Lease Revenue Bonds that suck up $3 million a year, and the city likes to squeeze more money out of the SDWD.
It's tough to get 40% of users, but if the city gets a few hundred protest letters, it will be a clear signal from the ratepayers that the council members up for election need to be responsive to the citizens.
Hi Jerry:Can you speak more to this issue, as I don't quite understand. I am in the SDWD and also got an increase. Are you saying we can actually have that overturned by protesting to the City Council? I do know that they are the Lords over the SDWD (personally I think that is a conflict of interst, but that's another post). How can protesting this, get our bills down? Even if we get new councilpeople, what can they do about it? Thanks for any information for all of us who really do want to learn and not complain all of the time.
ReplyDeleteBy Long Time Leucadian on 01/13/2008 at 12:06 p.m.
ReplyDeleteSimple answer- No.
It will be a DEPRESSION!
In macroeconomics, a recession is a decline in any country's gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year. However, in the United States the official designation of recessions is done by the business-cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Feldstein, 2007). The American National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession more ambiguously as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months." A recession may involve simultaneous declines in coincident measures of overall economic activity such as employment, investment, and corporate profits. Recessions may be associated with falling prices (deflation), or, alternatively, sharply rising prices (inflation) in a process known as stagflation. A severe or long recession is referred to as an economic depression. A devastating breakdown of an economy is called economic collapse. Newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris amusingly distinguished terms this way: "a recession is when you lose your job; a depression is when I lose mine."
Market-oriented economies are characterized by economic cycles, but actual recessions (declines in economic activity) do not always result. There is much debate as to whether government intervention smoothes the cycle (see Keynesianism), exaggerates it (see Real business cycle theory), or even creates it (see monetarism).
Whooooooo are you?
ReplyDeleteI think it is safe to say that Long Time Leucadian is not Danny Dalager.
ReplyDeleteI think Bond was a poor choice to be on the subcommittee. He, along with Stocks and Dalager helped to pass the amended document retention schedule based on what a "consultant" suggested 20 years ago.
ReplyDeleteWe never got a report from the Clerks on new law or policy, better practices after Deborah Cervone's and Claudia Bingham's weeklong taxpayer financed convention for clerks from all over the state. Why can't the public get a report on the new info from them, directly, perhaps as a special presentation at the beginning of a Council Meeting?
Maggie and Teresa both asked James Bond to bring this back. Now it was brought back, but saved until last and glossed over. Maggie and Teresa were the obvious choices, both having been to the League of Cities meetings where new requirements were discussed, and both associated with libraries.
Maggie is a former librarian and Teresa is an active Friend of the Library. James Bond was appointed to make this subcommittee less effective, not more effective, I'm afraid.