AB 2093 by Assembly Member Gloria (D-San Diego), which mandates that all public agencies to maintain all emails related to the public’s business for two years, has been scheduled for a hearing in the Assembly Judiciary Committee on March 10th. Thank you to the 75 plus districts that have already sent in their letters of opposition to the bill. If you haven’t sent in your letter yet, CSDA highly encourages you to do so. A sample letter can be downloaded from CSDA’s “Take Action” page on our website. Your letter will be effective no matter when you send them in as long as the bill is alive and moving through the Legislature. However, if you would like your district’s position to be officially registered with the Assembly Judiciary Committee, you’ll need to send your letter in before 5PM on March 3rd.
AB 2093, which is exactly like AB 1184 (Gloria, 2019) that was vetoed by Governor Newsom last year and will have negative impacts on all public agencies that aren’t currently retaining all their emails for two years.
While purposely drafted to avoid reimbursing public agencies for new costs, AB 2093 will require many agencies to purchase additional servers to store the massive amounts of data contained in the emails. Additionally, many agencies will likely need to hire additional staff to respond to California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests in order to review and filter through all the additional emails agencies are maintaining and will likely result in lengthened response times to CPRA requests.
While we all support transparency, this bill does not create greater transparency, it is simply a data retention bill. AB 2093 makes no changes to what agencies are required to disclose or what is exempt from disclosure under the CPRA.
Please help CSDA stop this well-intentioned but thoroughly flawed bill from becoming law by sending in your district’s letter of opposition.
Should you have any questions about the bill or sample letter, please feel free to contact CSDA’s Senior Legislative Representative, Dillon Gibbons, at dillong@csda.net or by phone at (916)442-7887.