Was Mamaroneck in the Wrong For Banning 'Geese' Emails?

Since the Village of Mamaroneck's contract with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to cull geese became public, animal activists, residents and other concerned members of the public have contacted officials via email and phone to plead with them to consider more humane solutions.

On March 16, though, Mamaroneck resident Gina von Eiff fired off an angry email to village trustees after several emails with the word "geese" in the subject line bounced back to her with an error message that said "banned content." She said several other people had similar experiences.

"Are we going to approach every problem with the all or nothing approach—I guess the answer is yes, since someone decided they should censor all e-mails, including residents' e-mails. And then I have to read that no residents are responding—disgraceful—you are not keeping these e-mails for the record as required by law and your are censoring the taxpayers," she wrote.

But are village officials required to keep what they might consider "unsolicited communications" in the form of email?  Are they considered government records that must be retained for a specific amount of time?

According to Jennifer O'Neill, a scheduling and state agency services manager with the NY State Archives, the emails were received "in connection with the transaction of public business" under the The Arts and Cultural Affairs Law Article 57.17. 

Further, she said, "The emails had to be received in order to have been 'read' by the email system and bounced back based on the content of the emails. The emails, thus, would be covered by our Local Government Records Retention and Disposition Schedule MU-1...if complaints, under 14c routine complaints, petitions, or requests relating to routine government services or activities (1 year after final disposition of complaint, petition or request)."

Routine correspondence with legal, fiscal, or administrative information would need to be retained for six years as per the law. 

Village officials, for their part, said that they put the filter in place to manage the large number of emails their server was inundated with.

"The village took steps almost two weeks ago to remove the filter and allow normal e-mail traffic. However, if the need arises because we are subjected to attack again, we will look into taking similar steps so that our normal day-to-day e-mail communications are not shut down by outside groups," said Village Manager Richard Slingerland.

However, he said, "For future instances regarding the retention of records, I will look into this further with our village attorney and the State Archives Administration so that any future actions we may take to prevent our e-mail and computer network infrastructure from being attacked are fully compliant with the law and able to protect our systems from crashing due to being overloaded."