SACRAMENTO —
A Superior court judge granted an eleventh hour restraining order preventing Sacramento City officials from deleting non-essential emails from its servers.
Judge Shelleyanne Chang granted a temporary restraining order to several citizens affiliated with Eye on Sacramento, a community watchdog group. They had submitted a Public Records Act request for emails dating back as far as 15 years. Their argument was that if the emails were deleted, they would be denied access to public records as required by law.
But attorneys for the city said they delayed the deletions for a week hoping the parameters would be narrowed but got no response. Millions of emails may be involved, most of them innocuous pieces of communications between staff members and complying might cost $50,000 and as much as 22,000 hours, according to court filings.
City officials say important documents related to finances, policy and contracts are already saved. They say the deletions were necessary because a contract to manage the city’s data systems was expiring.
Judge Chang questioned whether the restraining order was a ploy to challenge the city’s data storing policy rather than addressing a real public records request. But she granted the TRO because she saw no urgency in the city’s self proclaimed July 8 deadline to destroy emails.
The plaintiffs said they could narrow the search parameters and try to work with the city to get access to only the documents they need while the TRO is in place. They have said that often email records have been the only evidence of public wrong-doing in the past and that they should be saved.
There is a separate lawsuit against the city challenging the way it handles data and the need to purge emails without making a copy with access to the public.