MEMORANDUM
To: Cabinet Secretaries
From: Charles D. Baker, Governor
Date: July 30, 2015
Re: Public Records Requests
Three years ago, a national consortium of good government and media groups gave the Commonwealth a failing grade for its public access to information. Our administration is committed to improving state government’s previous poor transparency rankings. To do that, we must comply with, and even exceed, the requirements of our public records law as interpreted by the Secretary of the Commonwealth and the Supreme Judicial Court. While diligent efforts are made every day across the Executive Branch to respond to a large number of public records requests, we can improve our approach so as to reduce delays and costs that burden accessibility.
We also want to provide access in the most helpful way. An inefficient electronic mail storage system currently frustrates the ability of agencies to search and retrieve emails efficiently. Hopefully we can reduce this limitation. MassIT has already started to pilot agency-wide search capability, and will continue to do so throughout the rest of 2015 and the first half of 2016. This new tool will begin to ease the stress of broad email searches.1
We know too that requesters want to receive information in electronic, searchable formats. That makes sense. Software tools are available that allow for conversion of electronic documents to a format that permits, when necessary in accordance with applicable law, redaction of personally identifiable information, while still allowing for full text searching. Additionally, to increase responsiveness and create efficiencies, we want to encourage public posting of frequently requested records and data. Mass IT will support you on these initiatives.
This Memorandum provides guidance for the Executive Branch that reflects best practices from around the country. It is intended to help us be reasonable, fair and open – even when requests for records are hard to understand, broad in scope and difficult to fulfill.
We have launched the program, generally by Secretariat, with several state entities (MassIT, Division of Administrative Law Appeals, Civil Service Commission, George Feingold Library, and Appellate Tax Board) now using MassVault. We will continue roll-out this summer to the A&F central office, the Governor’s Office, the Gaming Commission, and several Education agencies. We also will begin the first phase of ongoing work this summer at EOHHS. Implementation at the state’s District Attorneys’ offices and several EOPSS agencies is slated for this fall. We continue to refine details of the full FY16 roll-out plan as relevant technical and business decisions are reached.