Maybe he figured since the Bush administration did it (and were ALSO breaking the law) he could get away with it in Texas. Read this via South Texas Chisme-article from the FW Star-Telegram.

Advocates of open government were aghast to learn that Gov. Rick Perry requires his staff to destroy e-mail records after seven days. This week, political activist John Washburn decided to do something about it.

The Milwaukee-based software consultant programmed his computer to automatically spit out two requests a week for all government e-mail generated by Perry staffers. He hasn't gotten a single e-mail yet, but Washburn has already achieved a victory of sorts. Under state law, records aren't supposed to be destroyed once somebody has asked for them.

Perry's office quit deleting the email but there's a couple of really egregious excuses they give for deleting them. One is that they don't have the space. Um. Aren't they doing BACKUPS? The price of hard drives right now is really cheap (or backing up on some other media, like CD, which is also cheap). That is just So Not An Excuse.

"We believe our staff is acting lawfully and in good faith," Moody said. She said Perry's office receives a "high volume" of e-mail and doesn't have the server space to keep them indefinitely

Duh! Isn't there anyone that works in Perry's office that, um, has experience in IT?????? Perhaps it's just Moody that doesn't understand what's going on.

The other worrisome thing is that Perry's group wants to decide FOR US whether the emails they save are useful. Nope, they're supposed to save EVERYTHING and not be a censor for what THEY think should be saved.

She also said the governor's office believes that some government e-mail, such as informal exchanges between employees about going to have coffee or lunch, don't have to be saved at all and can be deleted within minutes or hours after they're created.

"They are transitory, we're not required to [save them]," Moody said. "Basically, e-mails that have nothing to do with state business are eligible to be deleted at any time."

Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition in Missouri, said Perry's records-retention policy highlights the need to tailor public-information laws to the reality of modern technology. With so much business conducted electronically, he said, historical and archival records will be far from complete without e-mail.

"It sort of flies in the face of the spirit of the law," Davis said. "Not retaining that across the board is really quite stunning." He said that government transparency statutes generally presume most records are public but that bureaucrats for years have been "lawyering them to death" and using exceptions to limit disclosure.

The article goes on to remind about the Sharpstown (near Houston) scandal, which gave rise to the Texas Public Information Act.

"The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know," the act says in its preamble. "The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created. The provisions of this chapter shall be liberally cons1d to implement this policy."

Perhaps Perry's office needs to go back and READ THE LAW. So that they can, er, FOLLOW IT.