SUNSHINE ORDINANCE TASK FORCE
COMPLIANCE AND AMENDMENTS COMMITTEE
MEETING MINUTES
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
4:00 p.m., City Hall, Room 406
Committee Members: Erica Craven-Green (Chair), Kristin Chu, Doyle Johnson, Richard Knee, Allyson Washburn
Call to Order: 4:03 p.m.
Roll Call: Present: Craven-Green, Johnson, Knee, Washburn (in at 4:05)
Excused: Kristin Chu
Deputy City Attorney: Ernie Llorente (excused)
Clerk: Chris Rustom
Agenda Changes: None
1. Approval of July 14, 2009, regularly scheduled meeting minutes.
Motion to approve the July 14, 2009, meeting minutes ( Knee / Johnson )
Public Comment: None
On the motion:
Ayes:, Johnson, Knee, Craven-Green
Excused: Chu
Absent: Washburn
2. 09018 Continued hearing on the status of the April 28, 2009, Order of Determination of Anonymous Tenants against the Department of Building Inspection.
Mr. Rustom said the parties in the case were not notified of the hearing. However, the complainant was in the audience.
Complainant Anonymous Tenants said the department has claimed that they had an itemized cost analysis that allowed them to charge $6.50 for a copy of a document but have not produced it. The department, with the help of the City Attorney’s Office, also ignored the Task Force’s Order of Determination that required the production of the analysis, he said. Finally, to avoid producing the document the department removed the $6.50 fee, he said. All of this, he said, were violations of the Ordinance and should be found as such. An anonymous female said the department ignored the Task Force by continuing to charge the public $6.50 per copy between April 28 when the order was issued and July 30 when DBI decided to reduce the fee. The analysis must be released because the public needs to know the reasoning behind the higher charges. During a recent visit, she said, she was charged $3.00 for a copy of a document stored in a computer. She urged members to force the department into compliance.
Member Knee on questioning the anonymous female was told that the $3.00 fee was for a different kind of document and not for a photocopy.
Chair Craven-Green said a document provided by the complainant shows that the department has complied with the Order of Determination because the $6.50 fee has been replaced with the amount mandated by the Ordinance. On the $3.00 fee, she said it was for a different kind of document and was a different issue.
Member Knee said Mr. William Strawn of the department was asked at the previous meeting to produce a detailed cost analysis for any fee that cost more than $0.10 a copy. Based on the submissions, the department has not met the requirement, he said.
Member Washburn said she agreed with Member Knee.
Chair Craven-Green said the department has not given an explanation for fees that cost more than $0.10. However, she said, the department has confirmed that they are charging only $0.10 for photostatic copies which is the subject of the complaint.
Public Comment: Peter Warfield said he felt the public was being let down because of an earlier exchange between members discussing the matter. To limit the issue only to photocopying charges is not a good decision, he said. He also read from Section 67.30 ( c ).
No motion was made.
No further action necessary.
3. Developing recommendations for the proposed electronic document retention policy of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.
Chair Craven-Green and Member Knee said one of the reasons Mr. Richard Robinson, who is chief operations officer for the Department of Technology and chair of a Committee on Information Technology subcommittee, was invited was that the committee wanted to know about the city’s transition from the Lotus Notes platform to the Microsoft Exchange environment as well as the aspects on what was feasible technologically and fiscally when it came to email retention, storage, backup, archiving and retrieving electronic documents.
Mr. Robinson said for a balance of what is technically feasible and what is fiscally feasible is technically an email can be saved in some format in perpetuity. The reality of that is it starts to come with a significant fiscal cost for storage, retention, and overtime. One of the things that is also absent is a clear policy on what data retention term should be from the City Attorney’s Office, he said, and is one issue that the Department of Technology struggles with. The department has a finite amount of capacity in which to store emails in the system that it has. At some point in time it reaches that capacity. It is now close to 98 percent of capacity and the ability to continue to maintain is becoming problematic. One of the processes they do is ask people to archive locally some of their emails on their own volition. There was no clear outline policy from the City Attorney’s Office whether employees would do and how long those emails are to be retained. The city, he said, also has several email platforms. Some departments rely on Microsoft Exchange and then there are some departments that have their own environments where they retain and administer with their own policies. He said the city has made a declaration, and the department voted from a policy prospective, to move off the existing Lotus Notes platform which is in house to a hosted Microsoft Exchange environment. The city will not be hosting the physical infrastructure. It will be hosted by a larger aggregate provider but the departments will still be able to administer the names and identities.
Chair Craven-Green wanted to know if there was a timeframe and when feasibly would it be in place.
Mr. Robinson said the estimate to move the city off of the Notes environment to a hosted exchange was about $3 million but since $2.5 million of cut they are left with less than $1milion to go forward. He said there was another component that’s more technical in nature: the implementation of an active directory structure. The department believes they can actually get that piece done and start to move and migrate some departments to a hosted exchange. It would not be done in its totality but they believe they can move forward as funds become available later in the year.
Chair Craven-Green wanted to know when the first department will be moved.
Mr. Robinson said he could not provide a date but for his part it would be yesterday.
He said it was very frustrating to have to host two environments. Compounding the issue was that the City was in the process of moving its data center from 1 Market Plaza.
Member Knee wanted to know who or what determines which department shifts to Microsoft Exchange first. He wanted to know if it was a first come first serve basis or were there some criteria being set.
Mr. Robinson said there was prioritization and was based on a couple of things and need was one. The Police Department has a high need. The Department of Public Health and related health services have a need because they are sitting on ageing infrastructure. There were plans to move about 10 to 11 thousand users but with the shift in budget the department needs to come up with some evaluation criteria.
Member Knee wanted to know if the department would approve the Task Force’s wish to move to the new environment just because it happened to be the first to ask or would the Task Force have to establish the need for urgency.
Mr. Robinson said the ease of it was also at play because moving 10 or 15 people could be done relatively quickly. However, the challenge is that the department has a small staff for it as it has only three people in email administration. His recommendation was for the Task Force to contact the helpdesk to and get in the request to the email group and start the communication. One of the things that the department has not been able to do was going out and being overtly proactively setting up the prioritization because they don’t know how much money is going to be left at the end of the day.
Chair Craven-Green also wanted to know if the department was looking at how it would respond to issues of backing up emails, to restoring emails that have been deleted, to the ability to search for emails in response to a court order, a discovery order from a court in litigation against the City or for requests from the Task Forces body the SOTF. She also wanted to know if there was a way that the Task Force could work with the department to go inside the issue because what Task Force did not want was what is in the system, which by most accounts is particularly difficult to restore emails particularly difficult to search for in response to subject matter emails that maybe subject to a court order or maybe a subject of a Sunshine request.
Mr. Robinson said he is a big proponent of requirements. If something isn’t defined, it’s hard to deliver it, he said. He also said that the department had put out an RFP to have a consulting group come in and work with the departments .to determine what their legal requirements were. Those requirements would be codified into the RFP that will go out for the hosted services. He was hoping for a specific prescriptive set of business requirements from client departments. and a rationalization as to what those were as the department goes forward. They would also be in a position where they will have to figure out how to structure their services if one client department’s retention requirement is higher than the others. Would they raise the bar to that level or do they disaggregate the requirements and offer a different level of services? He would prefer that they raise the bar and keep it across the board for all departments. The process was in place if only for the funding issue.
Member Knee said the Task Force would like to establish a good strong relationship with COIT
Mr. Robinson said the department also has to look at other components which included disaster recovery. He said the department is keenly aware of the pain departments go through when they get a disclosure request and would like to make sure that they thought about that in the architecture of the system.
Member Washburn urged the department to not only to consider the business requirements of the various agencies and the laws that govern them but also the public, which is another big constituency and probably the main one.
Mr. Robinson said they are open and transparent and that message comes from the Mayor. He said he would be happy to have the Task Force on board as they go forward.
Member Washburn said she was concerned about individual employees on managing email since there was a capacity problem and no guidelines for it.
Mr. Robinson said there is a limited threshold and it was left to the employees to do deletions so they can continue receiving and sending emails with or without attachments. That was the only formal policy that the department has on the issue, he said.
Chair Craven-Green wanted to know what could be done since the consultant was the one who would work out the details of what the departments needed. The consultants, she said, should also be looking at what the public wants and the requirements of the Public Records Act and the Sunshine Ordinance.
Mr. Robinson said since emails would fall under operations and infrastructure, he would be the person to talk to. He suggested the Task Force attend the COIT sub-committee and main meetings, submit an item for the agenda so the Task Force could talk to the client departments and to start codifying the requirements so that it could be passed on to the consultants and be used when they aggregate the requirements. He also suggested the Task Force made sure that they sit down and talk to the consultants as part of the gathering requirement phase.
Public Comment: None
The committee thanked Mr. Thompson and Kim Thompson from the email and database group for their presentation.
The committee further discussed the issue and instructed Member Washburn to research best practices taken by the state and feds. Member Knee was instructed to talk to the Clerk of the Board.
Item continued to next month.
4. Continued discussion on the proposed amendments to the Sunshine Ordinance.
Chair Craven-Green was told that there were some small errors to change in the amended ordinance and she would email the changes to Mr. Rustom.
She also said she would finalize the cover letter by the next meeting but still needs the dates on which the committee met with DCA Paul Zarefsky and Susan Mizner of the Mayor’s Office on Disability.
The committee continued discussing the proposed amendments, especially passive meetings, public comment, anonymity, supervisor of public forums, hearing attendance, speaker time
Chair Craven-Green asked members to continue scrutinizing the amendment and look for discrepancies and clarify ambiguities.
Public Comment: None
5. Administrator’s Report.
Mr. Rustom made the report. He also informed the committee that New America Media has nominated Susanne Manneh to be their representative.
Public Comment: None
6. Public Comment on items not listed on the agenda; to be taken at 5:00 p.m. or as soon thereafter as possible.
Public Comment: None
7. Announcements, questions, and future agenda items from Committee members.
Member Johnson discussed Supervisor Eric Mar’s legislation to close loophole on post employment for City Commissioners.
Public Comment: None
Adjournment The meeting adjourned at 5:52 p.m.
This meeting has been audio recorded and is on file in the office of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force