“We reached out to MobileGuard and said, ‘Hey, all these one off cities, we certainly can’t afford your product, but collectively as an organization, if we could pool the number of users together as an organization, could we qualify for your discounted rates?’” Terry said. Terry said the rest of the ACCIS leadership was receptive to that sort of pitch, so he decided to bring that to MobileGuard. “So we talked to them about how we could leverage a high quantity of users through the ACCIS organization so we could get that price point down to a palatable solution for us.” “We knew that MobileGuard was an option, but it was fairly expensive,” Terry said. Accordingly, he started working with officials in Marysville, Washington and a water district near Spokane to figure out a viable way forward. ![]() But we tried to apply it at a policy level.”īut Terry said IT leaders around the state realized that sort of policy was hardly sustainable or effective. “Now, whether elected officials were doing that or not, that’s another thing. “We didn’t want to put ourselves into liability,” Terry said. In Arlington, he said the policy for employees was simple: “Thou shalt not text.” ![]() Indeed, the state’s supreme court unanimously ruled last year that texts by public officials can be disclosed under Washington’s open records statute, and Terry noted that created some substantial hurdles for localities to clear. The Association of County and City Information Systems, a trade group of IT professionals from local government agencies around the state, is currently working with software provider MobileGuard to link thousands of devices into the system and help localities develop a robust way to store SMS and MMS messages.īryan Terry - information systems manager for Arlington, Washington, and secretary at ACCIS - told StateScoop the new service has proven to be immensely helpful for agencies looking to comply with the state’s “really brutal” and expansive public records law. Now that courts have decided that text messages by government employees are subject to Washington’s public records law, localities across the state are starting to adopt software to archive workers’ text conversations.
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