County being sued over public records

Rumor has it the Gaetz is running for Ray Sansom's House seat and he needs to do something to make people forget he's also representing Jay Odom on the official misconduct charges.

Rumor has it the Gaetz is running for Ray Sansom's House seat and he needs to do something to make people forget he's also representing Jay Odom on the official misconduct charges.

Rumor? I thought this was common knowledge. But the BCC does need to follow the public records law. Something that they violate more inadvertently than anything else on a daily basis. Just go to south walton planning and ask for a public record.

Little Matt Gaetz grew up to be an attorney?

Holy carpfish, I am getting old.

Gaetz appears to be the people's champion.

Champion indeed...I understand that his daddy is also good about getting DUI charges dropped for family members :roll:

The guy is too chummy with Sheriff Morris and his cabal of thieves for my tastes.

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Champion indeed...I understand that his daddy is also good about getting DUI charges dropped for family members :roll:

The guy is too chummy with Sheriff Morris and his cabal of thieves for my tastes.

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and a Republican.

and a Republican.

...bless his heart.

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119.07 Inspection and copying of records; photographing public records; fees; exemptions.
(2)(a) As an additional means of inspecting or copying public records, a custodian of public records may provide access to public records by remote electronic means, provided exempt or confidential information is not disclosed.
c) Unless otherwise required by law, the custodian of public records may charge a fee for remote electronic access, granted under a contractual arrangement with a user, which fee may include the direct and indirect costs of providing such access. Fees for remote electronic access provided to the general public shall be in accordance with the provisions of this section.
(4) The custodian of public records shall furnish a copy or a certified copy of the record upon payment of the fee prescribed by law. If a fee is not prescribed by law, the following fees are authorized:
(a)1. Up to 15 cents per one-sided copy for duplicated copies of not more than 14 inches by 81/2 inches;
2. No more than an additional 5 cents for each two-sided copy; and
3. For all other copies, the actual cost of duplication of the public record.
(d) If the nature or volume of public records requested to be inspected or copied pursuant to this subsection is such as to require extensive use of information technology resources or extensive clerical or supervisory assistance by personnel of the agency involved, or both, the agency may charge, in addition to the actual cost of duplication, a special service charge, which shall be reasonable and shall be based on the cost incurred for such extensive use of information technology resources or the labor cost of the personnel providing the service that is actually incurred by the agency or attributable to the agency for the clerical and supervisory assistance required, or both.

Sorry but I lost the point of the post.

Lets see. I get about 10 e-mails on my personal account a day. If these are just text each would be 1 k but most have attachments so lets just say that every e-mail is 200 k on average (a wag and probably way low). 950 employees for constitutional and BCC lets say 400 have e-mail. 10 (e-mails) X 200 k = 2000 k or 2 meg per person per day X 400 employees = 800 meg per day X 5 days per week =4000 meg or 4 gig per week X 52 weeks per year = 208 gig per year for storage that needs to be searchable and retriavable. Of course with e-mails with attachments exceeding 2 meg this number could go up rapidly also this doesn't count spam or garbage e-mails with pictures that could really get the storage requirments to go up. Also this would need to be completly redundant storage so multiple backups on raid 10 disk drives would be needed. Hmm sounds like this could get expesive quickly.

Sorry but I lost the point of the post.

It all has to do with the cost to find the E-mails. The County could and should with all due diligence find the requested info and when that is completed a bill should be sent for the cost to the taxpayer to locate the information. Not only would that prevent the lawsuit, it will also give an employee a pay check. Sorry I did not make it clearer.

I knew this thread reminded me of something........... excuse the source and read the content of the link. I think it explains a lot about what goes into public records request when they get big.
Want Palin's e-mails? That'll be $15 million

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27228287/

It all has to do with the cost to find the E-mails. The County could and should with all due diligence find the requested info and when that is completed a bill should be sent for the cost to the taxpayer to locate the information. Not only would that prevent the lawsuit, it will also give an employee a pay check. Sorry I did not make it clearer.

Yes. Sometimes it is cheaper to just hire someone to come and peruse the records themselves. This issue has gotten a lot of interest from local government agencies, especially smaller ones on records retention, search capability, things of that nature. There are a lot of solutions available that I am finding that are surprisingly cheap even for the massive amount of space required. And these companies have some really good archiving programs. I have a google mailbox with 3 years of email and attachments that currently is only 4 gigs of space. Now I do delete quite a bit of stuff that I do not need, but from what I can tell from a program I am using I would only need about 5 gig a year to store ALL of my email in a redundant searchable cloud. This would run about $100 a year. So $40K annually may not be that bad of an investment to cover email backup and searchability. And I am sure could be had for less dollars on such a large purchase.


BTW, Florida Supreme Court has held that a search must take more than 15 minutes to fall under the extensive use of technology provision in a case brought against the Department of Corrections. That has pretty much turned into the standard.

Why would it cost so much to save emails?

All you do is save a copy before deleting it - it isn't rocket science and most businesses already do it - and are saving emails/files with much more info in them.

Why would it cost so much to save emails?

All you do is save a copy before deleting it - it isn't rocket science and most businesses already do it - and are saving emails/files with much more info in them.

And how do you propose gathering the records across multiple computers, including attachments, when someone asks you for every public record with the word beach in it? And how do you back up that data because you are legally bound to have a copy, crashed hard drive is a personal problem. And what do you do as employees come and go, where do you store their emails? Retention time depends on what the subject was. And what happens when someone says something in a public record then goes and deletes because they changed their mind from their own archive? Where do you find it?

You can store a pretty serious e-mail archive on a two terabyte hard drive that goes for less than $500 these days. My employer has no problem comprehensively archiving all employee e-mail for 400+ current employees and any number of former employees. (Though granted a massive Sunshine law request is no fun for the person/people responsible for pulling and compiling those e-mails)

. So $40K annually may not be that bad of an investment to cover email backup and searchability. And I am sure could be had for less dollars on such a large purchase.

Robert,
$40K a year increasing every year is not a bad price for the service but when thier is a $7.5 million dollar shortfall in revenue getting $40K might be a little difficult.

I like the -$500 mentioned by BM. Private enterprise triumphs once again. Why doesn't the right hand of government look the see what the left hand of private enterprise is doing more often. It would seem a lot of financial problems could be solved.

I also find it hard to believe that Walton County is the first (or only) government office being required to save emails. :roll:

I like the -$500 mentioned by BM. Private enterprise triumphs once again. Why doesn't the right hand of government look the see what the left hand of private enterprise is doing more often. It would seem a lot of financial problems could be solved.

Unfortunatly the $500 solution will not work. Using this just creates a simple backup of the e-mail system. This gives a one time snapshot of the system when the backup is run and is normally overwritten when the backup is run again or as changes are made. What this requires is the saving a permanent archiving of all e-mail sent to or from the county entity. This requires working from the mail server at the county. This system would need to never lose data never delete e-mail or files, never alow the removal of files or data, allow the searching and retrieval of files and be off site (not in Walton County). This would be a private sector solution one that would have to be bought and paid for by County Funds meaning tax dollars. The $500 external hard drive will not do this. More than likely for simple backups the county already has servers assigned for performing this task on a daily basis.

Unfortunatly the $500 solution will not work. Using this just creates a simple backup of the e-mail system. This gives a one time snapshot of the system when the backup is run and is normally overwritten when the backup is run again or as changes are made. What this requires is the saving a permanent archiving of all e-mail sent to or from the county entity. This requires working from the mail server at the county. This system would need to never lose data never delete e-mail or files, never alow the removal of files or data, allow the searching and retrieval of files and be off site (not in Walton County). This would be a private sector solution one that would have to be bought and paid for by County Funds meaning tax dollars. The $500 external hard drive will not do this. More than likely for simple backups the county already has servers assigned for performing this task on a daily basis.

Thanks for the clarification. As I have said many times previously, being computer illiterate has its drawbacks. I don't know how I, and millions of others, survived about 50 years without them. I'm not knocking them, I just don't understand them and, to be honest, I'm too lazy to learn more than the basic use of them.

There has to be an elegant and affordable way to do this, and if there's not, someone with $ to invest could do well to put a geek team on it already. I cannot believe it is really all this difficult. There must be algorhytms that can be written to back up new stuff without deleting the old. Jeepers.

I am sorry I did not mean to say that thier were no solutions to the public records email problem. Thier are many companies that have solutions for this. Thier is an article on the state using a symantic product. The problem is as always a matter of cost. I looked up some of these compaines online to see if any had cost figures and I only found one and it was over $4.00 per user per month or more depending on the amount of email that needed to be stored. The other companies have you call them and give information about your company so they can design a solution for you but thier price structure is not available online (at least not that I found with a quick search). So yes there are solutions that will work but the cost will be the issue. Robert suggested around $40,000 and that is probably about the best guestamate you can get without going throught the full process of sitting down with the vendors and working out details.

If it really costs that much, makes sense to hire someone to customize and manage Walton County's own program. I'm guessing someone could do that on a part time basis, or consulting, whether they lived here or worked remotely from wherever.