On the October 31, 2019 Somervell County Hospital District had an item on their agenda about a records retention policy. Essentially, what this means is, how long will the District keep, on Glen Rose Medical Center's website, items such as agendas,minutes, supporting documents and, on the hospital's Youtube account, video of meetings. 

From a practical standpoint, right now if you go to glenrosemedicalcenter.com you can see agendas and minutes all the way back to when the District was created. If you look on the video Youtube channel, same. Now, you want to be an involved, informed citizen in Somervell County. You can't, for whatever reason, actually attend a Somervell County Hospital District meeting in most cases, but you'd like to keep up on what's going on. Or maybe you only hear about a particular issue some months down the road, say, 6 months after it was discussed at a meeting and you want to both read about it as well as watch the video. With this new proposed retention record, you'd be out of luck if you weren't johhny on the spot watching WITHIN 90 days. Now, written minutes must be kept permanently, and IF there's only video or audio or a meeting it must be kept permanently, but otherwise, it can be deleted after 90 days.  Here's the proposed retention policy. 

One of the arguments made about this is how much disk space the videos take up. Certainly Mina Douglas has mostly been the one to record meetings and the video is likely on her office computer taking up space. BUT after the meetings, she or someone uploads the videos to Youtube. At that point, the videos are no longer taking up local disk space but space on some Youtube server somewhere. I can certainly understand wanting to clean out one's own computer but does this mean that videos on Youtube would need to be destroyed? Youtube videos were not explictly discussed or covered in the discussion below. 

On continuity. Many is the time, as you know if you've been a regular reader of Somervell County Salon for the past umpteen years, I will be interested in something recent and find out that it actually started years ago or want to hear discussion about why a vote was taken and decided a certain way and frankly, YOU CANNOT GET THAT FROM MINUTES which record only the basic actions. The richness and discussion can only be seen by video or heard by audio. 

I believe in the case of Youtbue hospital district videos, because it is no skin off hospital district resources, they should remain. If you feel as I do, please tell your elected hospital district board members. 

Rough Transcript:

Reynolds: It came about, there was a question about how long we should keep certain records, how long should we keep executive session minutes, so we went back to Kevin and asked if there was a retention policy on that and this came from Kevin's office and it's our recommendation that we approve this policy on how long we should keep certain records. Handwritten records to the video records. 

...MIna Douglas: Most of it we do already, the biggest question came to me about how long we keep the videos or how many videos I have on my computer, it's a memory issue. So had to talk to Kevin and see what all the requirements were  (inaudible). Most of the things we're already doing. 

Drake: So the videos just have to be kept for 90 days after minutes approval? 

Reynolds: Gotta keep the minutes but not the video.

Drake: I'll make a motion to approve the retention policy. 

etc.