[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO

[Alicia Mattson]

The discussion on this thread paints the motion in a very different light
for me.  I want to take a step back and put this in context.

The motion adopted by email ballot to create this committee included the
following scope description:

"The LNC establishes a Historic Preservation Committee to help preserve and
publish historical documents of the party and to manage LPedia."

The goal is to preserve and publish things of historical value.

This motion suggests that the newly-requested funds will be used:

"to budget an additional $5,000 (budget line 90) to relocate the historical
records in the Duke Street basement and in the off-site storage facility to
a location in Colorado..."

That to me sounds like the materials in question are of historical value,
and it thus warrants the expenditure to preserve them.

What we're learning, though, is that possibly the vast majority of this
material is trash, and we're paying thousands of dollars to ship trash to
Colorado to be thrown away there.

This is really more of a document destruction project than a historical
preservation project, though along the way it will likely find a few
historical documents worth preserving.

We created a Historic Perservation Committee, rather than a Basement
Cleanout Committee, and they're very different tasks.

I would be comfortable with volunteers in Colorado taking things deemed to
have historic value and scanning them for preservation, or making them
available for silent auction fundraising, etc.

I am not comfortable with volunteers in Colorado who have no experience in
operations of our headquarters essentially making decisions about what
documents get thrown away.

The reason I spent a day in the Watergate dungeon (I think it was in the
fall of 2011) digging through that material is because I was looking for
some records that should have been preserved in perpetuity, but *someone
who didn't understand their importance apparently threw them out*. They
actually had very high value for legal reasons.

As pretty as it sounds to have a team of volunteers in the birthplace of
the LP building historical archives, a person's Colorado residence doesn't
grant them magical knowledge of what business records ought to be kept and
which ones ought to be thrown away.

I realize that you say that the LNC will ultimately decide which things get
tossed, but the quality of the LNC's decision depends heavily on the
description of the records we are given.  If a volunteer describes to us
that a box contains miscellaneous receipts, it's one thing if it's
15-year-old receipts for office supplies that have long since been used up,
but it's another if the receipts are for equipment still in use today and
maybe still under warranty.  If a volunteer describes to us that a box
contains old email correspondence with a state chair, it's one thing if the
conversation was, "I look forward to seeing you at the convention", but
it's another thing if the conversation was relaying facts about a situation
that is the subject of a lawsuit.

If the person looking at the records doesn't really understand the context
of the records, how can they give us the key information we need to make an
informed decision about which ones to throw away?

This is not a project that should be undertaken by people with no
understanding of our party operations.

There may also be old employment records with sensitive personnel
information, social security numbers, etc., and those shouldn't just be
passed around among random volunteers.

I have no objection to paying for the committee chair to make a trip to the
storage facility, spend a few days sorting through it to find items of
historical value, and then shipping those 10 boxes to Colorado for further
processing.  That is within the function of a Historic Preservation
Committee.

I do have objection to shipping our trash-mixed-with-important-records
across the country for people who don't understand what is valuable and
what isn't to give us vague descriptions which will be the basis of
uninformed decisions for destroying our records.  This document destruction
task is not what I had in mind when the Historic Preservation Committee was
created.

For several years our outside auditors have been urging us to adopt
document retention policies (and also whistleblower policies, but that's
another subject).  I think it was two terms ago near the end of that term
that the Audit Committee proposed some starter language to try to get the
ball rolling, but the LNC has not yet implemented anything.

At minimum we need to establish how long certain records are to be kept
such as employment records, financial records, membership certifications,
and other categories.  These can be important to keep for legal reasons,
for FEC compliance, etc.  Even after we make those policy decisions, I
think the document maintenance has to be done by knowledgeable insiders
rather than miscellaneous volunteers.

-Alicia
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