Everything on our systems is a public record. How does that change email and backups?

Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes makes records made or received in connection with official business public records, and the medium does not matter. An email, a text message, a document in a shared folder and a message in Teams can all be public records. That has some very practical consequences for how the systems are set up.

• Personal email and personal phones are the biggest problem. When a commissioner or a department head conducts town business from a personal account, the record exists but the town does not control it, cannot search it and cannot produce it. This is where small governments get into genuine trouble. The fix is a policy that town business happens in town accounts, said out loud and repeated, plus giving everyone who needs one an account so there is no excuse.
• You need tenant wide search. A records request may cover several people over several years. Searching mailboxes one at a time by hand is slow, incomplete and hard to defend. The tools for this exist in Microsoft 365 but they are not in the cheapest licensing, and this is one of the few places where we will push a government client toward a higher license tier, because it is the difference between a request taking an hour and taking a week.
• Deletion needs to be deliberate. Staff clearing out mailboxes to free space, or an administrator purging an account when someone leaves, can destroy records you were required to keep. We set retention and holds so that deletion by a user does not actually remove the record, and we do not delete departed employees' mailboxes on our own initiative. We ask the clerk.

Worth knowing: backups and public records are different jobs. See the retention article next to this one, because that distinction is where most of the confusion sits.

And one on our side. Our own emails and tickets with your staff about town business can themselves be public records. We are fine with that, we do not write anything to you we would not want read out, and if a request reaches our records about your account we will cooperate with your clerk and your attorney rather than making it difficult.