State and National Transparency Groups Call on Cuomo to Save State Emails At Least 7 Years

     

The letter embedded below was emailed to senior Cuomo administration officials on January 29th, 2015.  The letter was months in the making, and the twenty  groups signing the letter did not release it to the public, because we did not want to put the governor on the spot publicly, and our goal is not to give the governor negative press, but to change a bad policy. We hoped our groups could stand with the governor as he announced a new email retention policy as part of Sunshine Week in March. However, an intrepid reporter started calling around after obtaining a recent Cuomo administration memo about new email deletions and our letter was subsequently leaked. (See Cuomo Administration Begins Large-Scale Email Purges in Capital NY.) As of today, the Cuomo administration has not acknowledged receiving our letter or otherwise responded to our request. Download our brief on email retention, and the following Cuomo Administration memos:

  • NYS Information and Technology Services General Counsel Karen Geduldig’s June 18 2013 memo to NYS Agency General Counsels
  • NYS Department of Health Deputy General Counsel Jean O. Quarrier’s July 30 2013 memo to DOH Employees
  • NYS Chief Information Officer Maggie Miller’s February 20 2015 memo to NYS Commissioners and Agency Heads
  • NYS Department of State Director of Business Solutions William D. Cross’s February 23 2015 memo to DOS Employees

Click here to view the letter.