Sunshine Week: Rounds says he rarely uses e-mail

By Chet Brokaw, The Associated Press | Saturday, March 15, 2008

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PIERRE — Gov. Mike Rounds says he receives information by e-mail, but he rarely sends e-mail to others.

"I personally don't communicate hardly at all by e-mail," Rounds told The Associated Press. "I prefer to do it face to face or with a formal letter."

A third option is to talk with people by telephone, the governor said.

Rounds said he believes a face-to-face talk or formal letter is more appropriate than e-mail when he needs to express his views.

Nationally, the AP found that e-mails in most states are officially treated like paper documents. But most states have rules allowing them to choose which e-mails to make public, and most decide on their own when e-mail records are deleted.

South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long, who has been involved in a lengthy review of which state and local records are public, said state law treats e-mail the same as paper documents or information kept in any other form.

"It depends on the content," Long said.

South Dakota law generally provides that government records are open if any agency is required by law to keep them. Other laws specifically provide that some records are closed because they deal with business secrets, personnel records, student information, medical records and other personal information.

If an e-mail contained information that would be closed in another format, the e-mail also would be closed, Long said. An e-mail containing information that would be public in another format would be open, he said.

"That analysis is going to be content-based rather than on the type of record it is," the attorney general said.

Rounds said the law generally protects documents relating to the deliberative process that he and other officials use before they make official decisions. An e-mail containing information provided to a governor as part of the deliberative process would not be considered open, he said.

Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry, D-Watertown, who has been trying to change state law to make more government documents public, said she also believes an e-mail's content determines whether it should be considered public or confidential.

E-mail that involves preliminary communications leading up to an eventual government decision would not necessarily be a public document, Turbak Berry said.

"I don't think it's reasonable to expect that every single step of every public official's reasoning needs to be disclosed," she said.

E-mail differs from other communications only in form, Turbak Berry said.

"So I don't think that every single e-mail gets opened. But I don't believe e-mail gets treated differently than other forms of communication just because of its technology," she said.