If you’re troubled by what you know about Dallas City Hall, just imagine all the things you don’t.
The Texas Public Information Act arms the public with a powerful right to access government information. It requires cities, counties, and the State of Texas to produce documents requested by citizens, bringing transparency to the inner-workings of our government. But having access to records is meaningless if those records have been destroyed. In 2009, the City of Dallas reduced its email retention policy to a scant 90 days, ensuring that information that could illuminate problems within our municipal government never see the light of day.
Before the city enacted this policy, I made an open records request for documents relating to the Trinity toll road project. It was early 2007, and I was in the midst of the toll road referendum and my second term on the Dallas City Council. I purposely did not make my request as a councilmember, but rather as a citizen using the procedure outlined in the Texas Public Information Act. As a councilmember, the city had no legal obligation to provide me with the requested documents, nor do so within any specific timeframe. But under the TPIA, the city was legally required to produce the requested documents within 10 days.
As a result of my request, I received a treasure trove of documents from the City of Dallas: emails from one of the project’s designers to the mayor, privately criticizing the size and speed of the toll road; internal city spreadsheets revealing the lack of funding for the toll road and its dramatically increasing cost; letters drafted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to me, with revisions made by the City Manager’s office. The revelations were highly damaging to toll road supporters and bolstered the opposition. Had the 90-day policy been in place then, most of these documents would have been destroyed before we knew they even existed.
That’s why I was pleased to see East Dallas’ Mike Northrup — Councilman Philip Kingston’s appointee to the city’s Charter Review Commission — champion a longer records retention policy. The Charter Review Commission is responsible for recommending changes to the city’s constitution. At a recent commission meeting, Northrup was shocked to learn that Dallas destroys electronic recordings of city board and commission meetings after 90 days. He pointed out that such recordings are typically the only way to discern the reasoning behind a board’s decision, and if someone wanted to understand the debate surrounding a particular issue, or catalog the many promises a developer made to secure a zoning change, they’d be out of luck under the current policy. Northrup proposed a charter provision requiring that such recordings be kept indefinitely.
I wholeheartedly agree. But I would argue that a larger problem is the city’s destruction of documents that chronicle what is transpiring behind the scenes, when staff and city management converse via email. That is where the real information lies (no pun intended).
Five years ago, the City Manager, City Attorney and City Secretary together decided to change Dallas’ document retention policy and decreed that emails were to be destroyed after 90 days. Since it could take a year or more to discover malfeasance, or even simple ineptitude, the new policy ensured that records detailing the back and forth among staff, management, elected officials and outside parties would be gone long before anyone realized a problem existed.
Emails have played a crucial role in uncovering problems at Dallas City Hall. Whether it’s the secret deals the city manager cut with gas drilling companies, contradictions in the city’s claims about the Trinity toll road, staff’s collusion with homebuilders in drafting a Draconian conservation district policy, or the city’s effort to pave Winfrey Point, emails have given Dallas residents great insight into how decisions are made at City Hall and by whom.
As the Charter Review Commission, and ultimately, the City Council reconsider the city’s document retention policy, they must focus on preserving city emails far longer than 90 days. Otherwise, how will we ever know what’s really going on?
