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| 5/29/2007 8:25:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Worker suspended for personal emails, nudity on county computer
MPD officer who exchanged emails with county staff deleted most emails from town computer
Ed Culhane
Reporter
An open records request by The Lakeland Times involving the Minocqua Police Department and the Oneida County zoning department has resulted in disciplinary action at the county level and a policy review by town officials.
At issue are emails circulated among a group of individuals including county zoning technician Jeff Krueger, who works out of the county's Minocqua office, and a Minocqua police officer, Sgt. Todd Hanson.
The Times's request seeks those emails. The newspaper, however, has not received the records, but did receive a disciplinary letter to Krueger.
On the county level, the inquiry sparked an investigation that uncovered emails containing pictures of adult nudity on Krueger's computer; a town probe found that Hanson had deleted most of the emails on his town computer.
A news source provided The Lakeland Times with copies of some of the emails. Because Krueger forwarded these emails to the group using his county email address and county computer, and because the content of the emails was not work-related, the newspaper filed an open records request for all emails sent by Krueger to Hanson.
The newspaper also filed an open records request with the town seeking copies of emails sent or forwarded by Hanson to Krueger and others in the group.
County zoning director Karl Jennrich denied the open records request based on his interpretation of the state's open records law.
"No 'records' as defined below, were located in response to your open records request," Jennrich wrote Gregg Walker, publisher of The Lakeland Times. Jennrich included the definition of "record" as found in Wisconsin statutes.
Walker again sought copies of the emails, including a copy of one obtained by the newspaper, pointing out they obviously existed and arguing that, since they were forwarded by a county employee using county communications equipment, they were public records.
"As you will notice, the record ... is labeled with the person's name and title," Walker wrote. "He is an employee of the Oneida County planning and zoning staff and his email message is shared with many other government employees. In fact the record is being shared with several non-government people and therefore is a public record."
In denying the request a second time, Jennrich cited Wisconsin statute 19.32 which states in part: "'Record' does not include ... materials which are purely the personal property of the custodian and have no relation to his or her office." Jennrich said he had found one email from Krueger to Hanson, and three from Hanson to Krueger. He said he was withholding the emails based on the definition in the statute.
Walker said this week he is considering whether to pursue the open records dispute in court.
Pursuit of records uncovers nudity
Subsequently, under a separate open records request, the newspaper obtained a letter of discipline issued to Krueger and signed by Jennrich. The letter states the newspaper's initial open records request led to a review of "those specified requested records on the computer issued to you by Oneida County."
That review "revealed one email wave file containing pictures of adult nudity and two emails containing pictures of adult nudity," Jennrich wrote. "Retaining these items on the computer issued to you by Oneida County is a violation of the Oneida County electronic use policy, which you signed on May 8, 2002."
As a result, Krueger was suspended for five days without pay.
An open records request to the town of Minocqua for emails between Hanson and Krueger was also unsuccessful, in this case because, if they ever did exist on a town computer, they were deleted.
In this request, The Lakeland Times asked for any emails to or from Krueger on Hanson's town computer using either the officer's official email address or a personal, Internet-based email address of the kind that can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet.
Town search reveals black hole
Town clerk Roben Haggart did not deny the request but said the records requested could not be found. Town chairman Joe Handrick said that, while it is clear Hanson had sent some of the emails sought by the newspaper, there was no way to know if he used the town computer. The emails the newspaper had in hand were sent by Hanson using his personal account.
"We didn't turn over any to the newspaper because when you send an email from a Yahoo account it doesn't create a record on your computer," Handrick said. "If a town employee was sending or receiving personal email on a Yahoo account, we can't tell that by looking at the computer."
That means it is possible Hanson sent the emails on a computer not owned by the town and on his own time. As for Hansen's official email account, it was largely devoid of emails.
"We had our computer specialist look at the email account," Handrick said. "There were a couple emails on there, law enforcement related, but none that met the open records request. The (police) chief informed me that detective Hanson, on a regular basis, deletes his emails when he is done working with them. I think it's safe to say a lot of people in the general public do that on a regular basis."
No trail, but a violation of policy
Deleting emails sent and received on the town email account, however, is a violation of town policy.
That policy, several years old, states in part: "all files and messages created, composed, sent or received on these (town) systems are and remain town property. Messages and files are not the private property of any employee and employees have no right or expectation of privacy in messages or files."
Police chief Norbert "Mac" McMahon said Hanson was not aware he was required to keep copies of all his town email correspondence, Handrick said.
"He (Hanson) said something to the effect that, 'What, I got to save these?'" Handrick said. "He (Hanson) did not understand what the policy is."
McMahon told The Lakeland Times others in the department were regularly deleting old emails. He said he issued verbal reprimands and provided every member of the department a copy of the existing policy and a copy of a memo on the issue recently written by Handrick. He had everyone sign it.
Handrick said he wrote a memo to all town employees in the wake of the newspaper's open records request because he believes there is general confusion about the letter of the law. For instance, Handrick said, although he has saved all his emails since becoming town chairman, he did it for his own work-related reasons and was unaware that the open records law required it.
Hence the memo, written in a question-and-answer format.
"It's 'what does the letter of the law say' versus you have to have some common sense too," Handrick said.
The first question in the memo is, "Can I send personal emails using my town-provided email address?"
"Generally, the answer is 'no,'" the memo states.
He then included some "common sense" exceptions, such as an employee sending a brief email to a spouse indicating the employee will be working late.
Handrick said employees should not use town computers to access their personal, Internet-based email accounts.
"If you need to use personal email during the day it should be on your own time and from a computer you own or one provided at our public library," Handrick wrote.
Email storage an uncharted area
As for deleting emails from town accounts, Handrick said it shouldn't be done. One exception, he said, would be unsolicited junk mail.
This raises the question of how emails should be stored as they can clog up hard drives and even network servers. Handrick said he and Haggart periodically store old emails on portable computer discs, allowing them to clean up hard drives.
"We don't technically have a policy on that (storing emails)," Haggart said. "We're going to try to get where employees are backing up their files on CDs (compact discs.)"
The policy of Oneida County with regard to storing emails is somewhat different from the town policy in that individual employees are expected to make judgments as to which emails are public records and which can be deleted. This isn't a written policy, said Margie Sorenson, acting county coordinator, but is dealt with in training provided to employees by Lynn Grube, director of information technology services.
"We've all been trained on how to store them," she said.
Grube said employees are taught to think of emails in much the same way they think of printed documents.
"Would you retain it in paper form?" Grube said. "That is one of the first questions you have to ask yourself."
Employees are provided with a list of standards to determine whether a document is a public record, standards that deal with categories such as county business, legal compliance, litigation, historic value and more.
In the case of the county, employees are required to create a file structure under which to save emails so that they can be quickly accessed when needed. These are then compressed and copied onto the county server, which is large enough to store them. Additionally, Grube said, the law requires that some files be deleted after a certain number of years. The file structure helps isolate these files in computer "folders" for this purpose.
Emails save time, add to stress
Jennrich, for his part, said he is frustrated with the entire situation. He receives an enormous volume of email. In some cases, the same email will be copied to him several times by various town, county or state employees. There are emails from professional organizations, government agencies, non-profit organizations, companies that do business with government, county residents and one recent piece of correspondence that discussed "vent pipe sizing."
"It's a difficult issue, personally," Jennrich said. "I do not have control over what comes in on my computer. I don't think it is reasonable to keep everything that comes into this office. We try our best to put them in files, but with the volume of emails it's hard to categorize where you put this or that email so it can be retrieved in the future."
Oneida County's written policy on electronic communications, by the way, does not forbid personal communications, although it states that these must be kept to a minimum and must be circumspect.
"Currently, limited personal use is allowed," said Sorenson.
This is about to change. The county's finance committee and a labor law attorney retained by the county have recommended that even limited personal use of county email accounts be forbidden.
The state Department of Administration has recognized some of the problems associated with electronic records and has issued a 20-page "primer" on the subject.
"Many business transactions that were once paper-based are now performed electronically," the primer reads. "In some cases, paper is not produced at all, and the electronic version may be the only record created. Government agencies, and the citizens they serve, risk losing access to public records stored in computer databases, email systems, local area networks, personal computers, audio and visual media or in unreadable formats on tapes and discs."
The primer then goes on for about 6,800 words in an attempt to address these issues.
This gets pretty dry and technical, but here is one interesting fact about public records: state legislators, unlike the thousands of people who actually work for the state, are not required to keep records they might later find embarrassing.
"Generally speaking, there is not a (record) retention requirement for them," said Dan Schmidt, an analyst with the Legislative Council. "Legislators have a little different policy than the rest of state government. They are not required to keep specific records."
Ed Culhane can be reached at ed@lakelandtimes.com.
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