Posts Tagged ‘email’

Is That All There Is? Strategies for Proving a Negative When a Person Alleges That Their Request for Records Has Not Been Fulfilled

Monday, December 16th, 2019

The breadth of the North Carolina Public Records Law and the explosion of digital public records have resulted in frequent and voluminous requests for public records. Such requests are time-consuming and often include records that exist only on the personal devices of individual employees and officials. In these situations, the agency must rely on those […]

Polling the Board

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014

Consider three scenarios involving polling an elected governing board: 1. The city manager has determined that it is time for new leadership in the HR department. She contacts each of the council members to find out if they approve firing the HR director. 2. The chair of the county commissioners has negotiated a good price […]

Email Subscriber Lists: A New Exception to the Public Records Law

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

In this blog post about citizen information, I noted that some local governments had obtained local legislation to protect email subscriber lists from some kinds of public access. Effective April 21, 2011, that law now applies to all local governments. This post summarizes its provisions.

A Reasonable Search of Employee Records: City of Ontario v. Quon

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

In this post about access to emails, I described three categories of public employee emails: 1)emails that are public records and subject to public access; 2) emails that are public records but an exception either prohibits disclosure or eliminates the right of public access; and 3) emails that are private (do not relate to the transaction […]