Back on April 18, our friends at the local liberal playground had a fun little conspiracy theory here. Then on April 24, the Knoxnews had this story about a Knox County Finance employee and Knox County Finance Director Chris Caldwell was quoted in the story. I discovered through multiple sources that the employee had left his employment in early May 2018. On May 7, 2018 I requested the work related emails of the employee. The Open Records custodian for Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett at the time declined to provide the documents.
Open Records Request of May 7, 2018
Knowing that Glenn Jacobs or his Democrat opponent would be the next Mayor on September 1, 2018 and that I had a record request and would request it again, I let it go. On September 13, 2018 at 3:30 pm, I submitted an open records request for three specific records. However, for this story one of the three was the work related emails of the finance employee from September 13, 2017 until his date of termination.
On September 24, Mayor Jacobs open record custodian said they had received them, On September 28, 2018 they said I could come the week of October 1, 2018, I went to the Mayor’s office on October 1, 2018 at 1:30 pm and examined all the documents I requested. In regard to the finance employee, what I was given to inspect were two pages. On one, an email statement that says “the account related to this user (employee) was terminated at close of business on May 4th 2018 (see attached termination request from HR). User accounts are kept for 60 days past termination then purged. This account would have expired around 7/4/2018”.
So, Knox County should have preserved the documents from May 7, 2018 (which was when they were requested) instead of allowing them to be purged on July 7, 2018. Instead, it seems from Zach Webb‘s response, they destroyed the documents on May 4, 2018.
The response from Knox County’s new IT Director Webb.
termination document on the employee, supplied by Knox County IT
