The Register's Editorial: Electronic paper trails reveal a lot about governor, regents

If you wanted to know how and why state leaders are making decisions that affect you, your family and your employer, the first thing you'd probably do is consider the discussions they had in formulating their policies.

In this day and age, these discussions are often handled through email. So it's more than a little troubling to see that Gov. Terry Branstad, at the advice of his legal counsel, pulled himself "off the grid" when he resumed office in early 2011. He doesn't send email, and the only emails he receives are periodic compilations of published news stories sent to him by his staff.

At the same time, the Iowa Board of Regents' deliberations are getting harder to track. In 2007, the board established a new policy that, in theory, made public all email exchanges involving five or more regents. All such email exchanges were to be posted to the board's website. But as the Cedar Rapids Gazette found recently, the number of these email exchanges dropped from nearly 50 in 2011 to just 12 in 2014 — and most of last year's emails were meeting notices.

Given the controversies facing the regents this past year, the decline in email traffic is hard to explain. Perhaps board members are simply following the lead of their governor and deliberately minimizing their paper trail.

In a recent deposition, Branstad said he doesn't want to use email as governor because "somebody might send me an e-mail that says something derogatory or inflammatory, and I didn't want that attributed to me." Of course, the beauty of email is that it provides a clear, written record of who said what, and when, eliminating precisely the sort of confusion the governor says he wants to avoid.

Branstad and the Board of Regents should take another look at their respective policies on the use of email. They should not only encourage written communications on matters of public policy, they should take steps to preserve those records and make them readily accessible to the public.