By Cecilia Nasmith
Legislative Clerk Brent Larmer gave Cobourg council a crash course in records retention at Monday's committee-of-the-whole meeting as they adopted the Town of Cobourg Records Management Program Policy.
The preparation of a Records Retention Bylaw was also approved, with associated schedules for the classification, retention and destruction of records.
Simply put, Larmer said, records management means organizing information so people can find it. To that end, the town provides staff and citizens with policies and procedures and guidelines, including a records-management policy, retention schedule and bylaw, records citation schedule, staff procedure user guide and on-going staff training.
And for anyone who questions the resources devoted to this effort, he added, it's required by legislation – the Municipal Act 2001, for example along with more than 280 other Federal and provincial statutes.
“It's extremely difficult, if not impossible to perform efficient operations and provide effective services without a strong records- and information-management infrastructure supporting the organization,” his report said.
Records can be printed, on film or electronic. They include correspondence, memoranda, plans, maps, drawings, photographs, and text messages.
Along with 250 other municipalities, the town is using The Ontario Municipal Records Management System. Under this method, documents undergo primary and secondary classification to be assigned one of 150 different codes. A minimum retention time is assigned according to existing legislation, though council requests (and legal holds on those that might be needed for potential and actual cases) might extend that time.
Each record gets an information sheet that includes its code number, a description, the responsible department, the total retention period (after which it will be deleted or destroyed) and a column called Exceptions, Notes and Citations.
Under this last column, one might see a number of designations.
Permanent means never to be destroyed or removed from the system, like bylaws.
Superseded means replaced by a newer version.
Event refers to something event-based, like election records.
Vital Record means something that must be easily retrievable, such as banking information.
Personal Information refers to an identifiable individual, so properly managing these records is vital to preserve that person's confidentiality.
Archival means of historic value.
When a record must be destroyed, the process is documented, witnessed and – in itself – recorded and retained.
Larmer added a couple of interesting facts, like the town's annual payment to information professionals to provide an update on all changes to legislation governing records retention.
“It costs $300 to do, but saves hours and hours of work to go through that legislation,” Larmer said.
He added that, in contrast to years past, more than 90% of records created today are electronic. Of those, more than 70% are never printed.
The 2020 budget allots $154,000 for their records-management system. The same is budgeted in 2021, along with a $50,000 capital item for a records-management server.
Councillor Emily Chorley suggested the town revisit its policy of archiving recorded council meetings for only three months, since six months is the window for Code of Conduct challenges.
“When we looked at this initially, we did contact the province for direction – to our surprise, there was no policy,” Mayor John Henderson said.
“Initially we came up with three months, thinking it was reasonable. But I concur a lot of things have happened since then.”
