Records Commission approves retention updates as staff shifts from paper to electronic records

The Records Commission approved updates to several retention forms and discussed the practical impacts of shifting the city's records program from paper to electronic formats.

Finance staff reviewed a comprehensive set of changes to the RC2 retention schedule driven by the department's transition from paper to electronic records. Staff said the bulk of the edits update wording to reflect electronic scanning and to reorganize and renumber form codes; they also proposed removing obsolete paper accounts-receivable record types that are now generated and stored in department software.

"Most of the changes are related to the fact that we're trying to go from paper to electronic," Kim said while walking commissioners through the RC2 edits, citing reordering of form numbers, added electronic media types for tax forms, and new retention entries for RFPs and RFQs recommended by the historical society.

Other RC2 highlights included changing wording from "sale/donation" to "disposal" to cover multiple methods of asset disposition; adding explicit retention entries for travel-expense records; and clarifying payroll-record retention while the scanning transition continues.

The commission moved, seconded and voted to approve the finance RC2; commissioners also approved the RC1 submitted by the law department (authorizing destruction of identified 1970 6 to 1989 records) and the RC3 for the city manager's office (correspondence, attendance reports, payroll sheets, leave requests and journals). Votes were recorded as affirmative by the members present.

Commissioners discussed that RC3s would be used to record what is destroyed and that staff will continue to ensure items legally required to be permanent (for example, some ordinances and resolutions) are not removed improperly. No appeal or challenge was raised at the meeting.