On any given day, hundreds of thousands of emails shoot into and out of the accounts of New Mexicos estimated 26,000 state employees.

The content of these messages can be as weighty as policy memos that shed light on how the publics business is being done, requests for help and demands for favors. They can be as trivial as a report that glazed donuts are available in the break room.

Deciding which are important enough to keep and which can be trashed presents a challenge. Finding the saved messages later adds another layer of difficulty.

And from the looks of things, state government doesnt have a good handle on the situation. The dilemma is illustrated by what happened last year, when SFR was tracking communication between two key public officials.

One of the players involved was a newly elected state senator who had just finished serving his first legislative session. The other was Gov. Susana Martinez point-person for working with the state Legislature.

During the 2013 legislative session, Sen. Mark Moores, R-Bernalillo, had publicly made a fuss about a procedural action in the Senate Rules Committee.

His concern? The committee planned to allow Michael Corwina well-known political opposition researcher for Democrats and at the time the director of a political committee known for digging up dirt on the Martinez administrationto testify against one of her key political appointees.

Your decision to grant special treatment to Mr. Corwin is unwarranted, reads a draft of a letter from Moores addressed to committee chairwoman Sen. Linda Lopez, a Democrat from Albuquerque. I ask that you consider my request to reverse that decision.

Moores apparently didnt write the letter all on his own. Janel Anderson, the governors legislative liaison, emailed the draft to him from her government account in a message with the subject line letter.

But that message wasnt provided by the governors office in response to a public records request about correspondence related to the hearing. Instead, SFR hunted it down through the states Legislative Council Service.

Read the original:

Email Fail