Opinion: Flint water crisis a lesson for Colorado government email retention

Imagine you live in Flint, Michigan, and it’s been your home for years.

You’ve just learned the drinking water the town has supplied for the past couple of years has been contaminated with lead. Yes, the water you used to shower and wash your dishes, the water your children drank and used to brush their teeth, tainted. 

You want answers. Frankly, you deserve answers. Everyone deserves answers.

Now it’s January 2016. Imagine as your local paper and TV news stations try to dig deep to find out what and how things went wrong by filing open records requests, the government comes back to those outlets and essentially says, “Sorry! Any emails before Sep. 1, 2015, were automatically deleted.” 

You may still get answers, but likely they’ll always be incomplete. That didn’t happen in Flint, but could unfortunately happen all too easily at Colorado’s state agencies. Continue…

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