2007-01-10 Board of Ethics Minutes Regular Session

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Board of Ethics Minutes of Regular Session January 10, 2007 WJ: ... and he (RW) moved to defer, so are you seconding? Any further discussion? Are you making a motion to defer 04 and 05? AL: I would like to read 05 before we defer. Motion and Vote: Mr. Williams made a motion to defer Communication 2007 -04 to our next scheduled session; Ms. Lum seconded the motion; all members voted aye, motion carried. (c) Communication No. 2007 -05: Memorandum from Lincoln Ashida dated January 2, 2007 regarding HRS Chapter 487R. AL: I didn't know we had a committee on the destruction of records. WJ: I wasn't familiar with that either. RW: Is that like an ad hoc committee? BLT: It's an internal county committee. The intent is to try and have as much uniformity between the departments in terms of how long you keep a record and when can you destroy records, and what types of records need to be kept for what periods. Like, you've got financial records, in terms of expenditures of funds received, but you might have personnel records, and the question is at what point you destroy the documents that you have. Also, what documents are important never to destroy and keep a permanent record of. Part of the problem was that in the past when you have paper records after a while if you.... The county has been around for 100 years. It is not only destruction of records; it is just maintaining the records that become problematic. One of the things they are starting to look at is if you keep or start providing electronic copy, can you destroy the paper copy? Some of that has to be worked out in the state, because obviously being able to store them electronically removes some of the reasons for destroying. It becomes very cumbersome to keep physical paper copies of everything for a long time. Like, we periodically get notices that our email boxes are overloading the email server, so please discard and purge. KS: For the sake of discussion I would support any attempt to have universal policies and procedures to apply to all the departments. Currently, the standard to have a policy or procedure for monitoring how well you are complying with your own policy just adds on another layer of bureaucracy and time. If it is uniform, that job can be made as efficient and as less time consuming as possible. The other issue, in terms of mechanical storage, is space. Both those things relate to cost of government because if you have to have a whole new building to keep your records in, that is a cost. So I totally support the idea of having a comprehensive department. WJ: It makes good sense. AL: We should defer this until Lincoln comes to talk to us about this.