Email, Texts and Digital Records

Most government work now happens on screens. Decisions get made in an email chain, a text to the county commission chair, a Teams chat between department heads, a comment on the city's Facebook page. Idaho's Public Records Act was written in 1990, before most of that existed, but its definition of a record was written broadly enough to reach it. This lesson explains how far it reaches, where the gaps are, and how to ask for digital records in a way an agency can answer within the deadlines in lesson 4.

The definition looks at content

Two definitions in 74-101 carry the load. "Public record" (13) "includes, but is not limited to, any writing containing information relating to the conduct or administration of the public's business prepared, owned, used or retained by any state agency, independent public body corporate and politic or local agency regardless of physical form or characteristics." And "writing" (18) includes "every means of recording, including letters, words, pictures, sounds, or symbols, or combination thereof," on paper, tape, film, discs and "other documents."

Read together, the test has two parts. First, content: does it relate to the conduct or administration of public business? Second, connection: was it prepared, owned, used or retained by an agency? An email, a text, a voicemail, a spreadsheet, a photo, a GIS layer, a video file and a chat log can all pass both parts. The only exception written into the definition is narrow: "personal notes created by a public official solely for his own use shall not be a public record as long as such personal notes are not shared with any other person or entity." Once shared, even with one colleague, the exception is gone.

The Attorney General's Public Records Law Manual (July 2026, Question 6) is direct: "To date, e-mail (electronic mail) and text messaging have not been separately addressed by the Legislature. E-mail and texts are considered public records and are subject to the same laws as any other public record." The same answer adds a limit that matters for data requests: "nothing in the public records law requires the creation of a record in order to provide it."

The Idaho cases

Cowles Publishing Co. v. Kootenai County Board of Commissioners, 144 Idaho 259, 159 P.3d 896 (2007), decided in May 2007, is the Idaho Supreme Court's leading email case. A newspaper publisher asked for email between the elected county prosecutor and a manager he supervised in a juvenile drug court program, funded by a federal grant, that had since been broken up. The manager argued the messages were private. The court disagreed unanimously. The Reporters Committee summary quotes the court: "The e-mails are public records and not exempt from disclosure under either statutory exemptions or constitutional law." The reasoning, as summarized there and in the AG manual:

• The content related to the public's business: an employee's job performance, a county program's spending and the program's collapse.
• The county's email policy said the system was county property and messages between employees were public records; the manager had signed it, so there was no reasonable expectation of privacy.
• The personnel exemption is read narrowly, and informal messages between an employee and a supervisor are not a personnel decision.

The AG manual's one-line summary of Cowles is the rule most custodians are trained on: email "even though of a personal nature, may constitute a public record if it relates to the conduct or administration of public business and provides an explanation for a public official's actions, provided that the document is owned, used, or retained by a public agency."

Two other cases round out the picture. Fox v. Estep, 118 Idaho 454 (1990), decided under the older statutes, held that a trial court was wrong to rule as a matter of law that a county clerk's handwritten notes of commission meetings could never be public writings, and sent the case back; the AG manual reads it as treating such notes as part of the clerk's duty to record proceedings, which is why informal format alone does not settle the question. Henry v. Taylor, 152 Idaho 155 (2012), is summarized in the AG manual as holding that records about a prosecuting attorney's private bank account were public records, which shows that a "private" label on an account does not settle the question. These are the closest Idaho appellate guidance; we did not find an Idaho Supreme Court opinion squarely about text messages on a personal phone.

Personal phones and personal accounts

Idaho has no statute that speaks directly to officials using personal phones or personal email accounts for public business. The definition supplies the answer most custodians apply: if the message relates to public business and was prepared or used by the official in that role, it is a public record wherever it sits. The practical difficulties are real. An agency cannot search an official's personal phone the way it searches its own server; it usually has to ask the official to search and produce responsive messages. Requesters should therefore name the official, the dates and the subject, and ask that the agency direct the official to search personal devices and accounts used for public business.

74-121(1) adds a property rule: public records of the state "are the property of the citizens of the state in perpetuity and they may not be improperly or unlawfully transferred or removed from their proper custodian." The section lets the State Archivist (or, for counties and local districts, the responsible official, with the county prosecutor in the AG's role) demand return of records held by someone not authorized to keep them, where the holder came into possession on or after July 1, 2011.

Legislators

The Legislature is covered by the Act (the definition of state agency includes the legislative branch), but it has its own rules. 74-109(2) exempts legislators' "personal communication" that "does not relate to the conduct or administration of the public's business," and 74-109(3) exempts personally identifying information of private citizens in writings to or from a legislator (lobbyists, public officials and people writing for an organization are not private citizens). Requests to an individual legislator go to the legislator with a same-business-day copy to the Legislative Services Office (74-126).

Retention is the gap. In April 2025, after a state representative told reporters during a House floor debate that she would delete texts she had received from people affiliated with universities, Idaho Education News and the Idaho Capital Sun reported that a records request delivered about half an hour after the vote found the messages already gone. The article explained that the Public Records Act has no provision barring destruction before a set period, that lawmakers have no retention requirement and can delete records unless someone has filed a request for them, that deleting records after a request is filed would violate the Act, and that state agencies, by contrast, follow a retention schedule from the Idaho State Historical Society. The representative later said the remark was meant as levity. The episode is a clean illustration of the rule: the content made the texts public records, and the absence of a retention rule made them disposable until a request arrived.

Retention: whether the record still exists

A records request reaches only what exists on the day the agency searches. Retention schedules decide that, and they are set outside Chapter 1 of Title 74.

Agency type	Retention source	What it says about digital records
Counties	Idaho Code 31-871	Permanent records at least 10 years; semipermanent at least 5 years after completion; temporary records, including "correspondence not related to" the other classes, at least 2 years. Records may be destroyed only by commission resolution after audit and on the prosecutor's advice, except law enforcement media recordings.
County law enforcement video and audio	31-871(1)(a) and (2)(d) to (f)	With evidentiary value: at least 200 days. Without it, from mobile equipment (body and vehicle cameras): at least 60 days. Without it, from cameras fixed to a building: at least 14 days.
Cities	Idaho Code 50-907	Permanent (minutes, ordinances), semipermanent (contracts, financial records: at least 5 years) and temporary (at least 2 years); each council adopts a retention schedule by resolution; records may be kept digitally; semipermanent and temporary records are destroyed only by council resolution on the city attorney's advice.
State agencies	Idaho State Archives schedules	Agencies follow retention schedules from the Idaho State Historical Society's archives program, as the 2025 Capital Sun report described.
Legislature	None	No retention requirement, per the 2025 report; records that exist when a request arrives are covered.
Any agency, once a request is denied	74-115(2)	The agency must keep the records in question until the appeal period ends or a court decides.

Two details in 31-871 matter for body camera requests. "Evidentiary value" (31-871(3)(a)) includes any use of force, events leading to an arrest or citation, events that are a crime, an encounter about which the subject has filed a complaint, and an encounter "about which a valid public records request has been filed by a subject, or his representative." So a person who appears in a recording can extend its retention to 200 days by filing a records request. A request from anyone else does not change the classification under that clause, which is a reason to request video early. And "law enforcement agency" there includes a private contractor providing county law enforcement services. City police departments are not covered by 31-871; their video retention comes from the city's adopted schedule under 50-907.

Auto-delete settings deserve a question in any email or chat request. Idaho's retention statutes classify records by type and content, and 50-907(6) lets cities keep records in digital form, but none of the statutes mentions automatic deletion. A county email system set to purge all mail after 90 days sits uneasily with a statute that sets a two-year minimum for correspondence and requires a commission resolution before records are destroyed. Ask the agency what its retention settings are for email, chat and text messages; the answer is itself a public record, usually in an IT policy or retention schedule.

Video, 911 and dispatch

Body camera and dashboard video is a "writing" under 74-101(18), and when made by a law enforcement agency in an investigation it falls under the investigatory records rules in 74-124: exempt only to the extent release would interfere with enforcement, deny a fair trial, constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, reveal a confidential source or investigative techniques, endanger officers, or reveal a child abuse reporter. Basic facts of the incident are never investigatory records, and inactive investigatory records must be released unless one of those harms applies. Since July 1, 2026, photographs or images of a decedent from a coroner or law enforcement death investigation are exempt whether or not the investigation is active (Senate Bill 1250; see lesson 6).

Whether all body camera video is a "public record" in the first place is before the Idaho Supreme Court. The court's hearing calendar summary for Docket No. 52772 describes an appeal by the Ada County Sheriff's Office from a district court order compelling release of body-worn camera video of the fatal shooting of a sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop and the response in the minutes after. The sheriff's office argued the video is not a public record, and alternatively that it is exempt because it contains medical information and would be an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. The district court stayed its order pending appeal, and the case was argued on May 13, 2026. As of October 16, 2026 we found no published opinion in the case; check the court's opinions page for the outcome before relying on either side's position.

For 911 audio and dispatch records, there is no Idaho statute specific to their public release that we found in Chapter 1. They are writings, and the same 74-124 analysis applies when they are part of an investigation. The AG manual lists an old Ada County district court ruling (Eugene Television, Inc. v. Montgomery, 1988) holding police dispatch tapes exempt under the prior statute because they would reveal investigative techniques used during bank robberies. That ruling is unreported and predates the 2015 recodification; it shows the kind of argument agencies make, not a binding rule. Computer-aided dispatch logs (time, location, call type) hold the kind of facts that 74-124(3)(a) says are not investigatory records.

Lesson 8 covers law enforcement records in full, and the plate reader lesson in the surveillance module covers audit logs.

Databases, spreadsheets, GIS and metadata

The Act reaches data, with some limits on format:

• Electronic copies. 74-102(15): nothing prevents an agency from providing an electronic copy "if the record is available in electronic form and if the person specifically requests an electronic copy." Ask specifically.
• Conversion. If an existing electronic record must be converted to another format and that cannot be done in time, 74-103(2) requires written notice and delivery at a mutually agreed time. 74-102(10)(d) lets the agency charge the cost of conversion.
• No duty to create. The AG manual says the law does not require an agency to provide records "in a format not used by the agency in the normal course of business," and gives examples: an agency need not alphabetize information or "engage the services of a computer programmer to provide the information in a format desired by the requesting party." An unreported 1994 Ada County ruling it lists (Federated Publications, Inc. v. Schroeder) required an assessor to provide records only "in a reasonable format, not necessarily in the particular format requested."
• Software versus data. 74-107(15) exempts computer programs developed or purchased for an agency's own use, but says a computer program "does not include" the original data (numbers, text, voice, graphics, images), analyses and compilations produced by the program, or the formulas that would be used to produce them by hand. The software is exempt; what it holds and produces is not, by that exemption.
• Statistics. 74-102(14): nothing prevents an agency from disclosing statistical information describing identifiable persons unless prohibited by law. A count of permits by month is easier to get than the permits.
• GIS and locations. Map data is a record. 74-108 exempts locations of archaeological sites and endangered species not already known to the public, and precise wildlife telemetry and remote camera locations (but not aggregated or generalized locations). 74-105 exempts critical infrastructure details when release is reasonably likely to jeopardize safety, and cybersecurity systems, but neither exemption covers public expenditure records.
• Lists. If you want a list of people (license holders, utility customers), 74-120 bars agencies from distributing lists for use as mailing or telephone lists without permission, with exceptions such as voter lists. 74-102(5)(b) lets the custodian ask whether that is your purpose.

Metadata (the author, dates, recipients and edit history stored inside a file or email) is part of the "writing" when the record exists in electronic form, but Idaho's statute does not mention it and no Idaho case we found addresses it. Requests for email in native format (for example .msg or .eml files, or an export that keeps headers) preserve sender, recipients, dates and attachments; a PDF printout may drop some of that. Ask for native or export format and accept PDF if that is all the agency's system can produce without conversion.

Social media, chat and collaboration tools

Posts and comments on an agency's official social media account, direct messages sent to it, and chat in Microsoft Teams, Slack or similar tools all meet the definition when they relate to public business. Idaho has no statute or appellate case specific to them that we found. The questions to ask are the same as for email: who are the custodians, what are the dates, what words to search, and what retention setting applies. Chat retention is a local IT setting, so ask what it is.

An official's personal campaign page is a closer question. Campaign activity is not public business, but an official who uses a personal page to announce agency decisions or discuss pending votes is producing content about public business. No Idaho court has drawn that line that we found; describe what the page is used for when you ask.

Record type	Usually held by	Retention to check	Exemptions often raised
Agency email	IT department or clerk, by custodian mailbox	31-871 correspondence (2 years min, counties); city schedule; State Archives schedule	Personnel (74-106), attorney-client via 74-104(1), personal identifiers (74-106(4))
Texts on agency phones	Official, IT if phones are managed	Same as email, if the schedule covers texts; ask	Same as email
Texts on personal phones	The official	No separate rule; Legislature has none	Personal communications not about public business are not records at all
Body and dash camera video	Sheriff, police, prosecutor	31-871: 200, 60 or 14 days (counties); city schedule	74-124 harms; privacy (74-101(17)); decedent images (2026)
911 audio, dispatch logs	Dispatch center, sheriff or city	County or city schedule	74-124; basic facts in 74-124(3) must be released
Databases and spreadsheets	Department that runs the system	Depends on record class	74-107(15) covers software only; 74-120 lists; personal identifiers
GIS layers	GIS office, assessor, planning	Depends on record class	74-108 locations; 74-105 infrastructure and cybersecurity
Meeting audio and video	Clerk	Local schedule; see the open meetings module	Executive session recordings, if any

Sample language:

Public Records Request under Idaho Code 74-102. I request email messages, including attachments, sent or received by the Cedar Bluff County Public Works Director and the County Administrator between March 1 and April 30, 2026, that contain any of these terms: "reservoir," "Well 4," "Pine Hollow pump." Please provide them electronically in native format or an export that preserves sender, recipients, dates and attachments (74-102(15)). If the search returns more than 300 messages, please tell me the count before review so I can narrow the request. I am an Idaho resident; my declaration is below.

Public Records Request under Idaho Code 74-102. I request text messages, and messages in any messaging app, sent or received by Commissioners A and B of the Cedar Bluff County Board of Commissioners between June 1 and June 15, 2026, concerning the Pine Hollow subdivision application. This includes messages on county-issued phones and on personal devices or accounts used to conduct county business. Please provide each message with its date, time, sender and recipients. I also request the county's written retention policy or schedule that applies to text messages.

The agency side again: a broad email search can return thousands of messages, each of which needs review for Social Security numbers, medical details, attorney-client advice and personnel matters before release. Agencies with small staffs and no e-discovery software do that review by hand. Specific requests are faster for both sides, and a requester who asks for a hit count first lets the custodian give an honest estimate.