State board asked to block agencies from destroying public records
Clark Kauffman March 26 2022 Iowa Capital Dispatch
The head of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council says steps should be taken to ensure that public documents requested by the press and public aren’t then destroyed by government agencies.
Randy Evans, the council’s executive director, has written to the Iowa Public Information Board about the Iowa Capital Dispatch’s request last year for work-related text messages on the state-owned phone of Iowa Workforce Development Director Beth Townsend.
Although IWD received the request for the text messages in May 2021, agency officials said they made no attempt to look at Townsend’s phone and retrieve the records until the Iowa Public Information Board asked the agency to do so in February of this year.
