Dana Desjardins, the Raymond selectman who recently told his fellow board members and town employees that he would no longer correspond via e-mail, returned his town-issued laptop last week.

The only hitch is that the computer was completely erased, an act that could violate the Maine Right to Know law.

According to Kevin Woodbrey, information technology contractor for the town, the three-year-old Dell Latitude D820 laptop came back last week with a new operating system.

“For all intents and purposes the previous operating system was wiped and a new operating system installed,” Woodbrey said.

Desjardins doesn’t deny erasing the operating system and said he had no knowledge that doing so possibly violated the state’s freedom of access law that forces municipalities to save e-mail for a period of time, as those documents are public and must be presented to a member of the press or public upon request.

“I wanted to give it back to the town the way I received it, so, yeah, I had someone erase all my personal stuff. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with that. I wanted to give it back in the same condition I got it,” Desjardins said.

Desjardins said he used the laptop for personal banking and other personal uses such as storing his daughter’s graduation photos.

“I wasn’t going to return it with all that stuff on there, mainly because I don’t know what they want to do with it. That only makes sense,” Desjardins added.

Desjardins also confirmed that he deleted his e-mail account, which was confirmed by Woodbrey. Woodbrey said the Thunderbird e-mail program – as well as anti-virus software, Firefox Internet search engine, Roxio CD burner, Open Office (including a word processing and spreadsheet program) in addition to video and sound utilities – were deleted from the computer.

The new operating system Desjardins had installed in its place was Windows XP Professional, the same as was on the computer when Desjardins received it in summer of 2007.

The erasure is notable since, according to state law, town officials are supposed to keep town correspondence, including e-mail. When asked if he backed up the e-mail to another location such as a hard drive or his personal computer, Desjardins said he had no such backup since he thought the hundreds of e-mails he wrote over the years were stored on the town’s main server.

“I thought everything was backed up on the server,” Desjardins said. “I deleted a whole bunch of e-mails before that since I used to get sometimes hundreds of e-mails a day, mostly junk. But I guess somebody should have let me know they weren’t being stored on the server.”

But according to Laurie Forbes, a technology volunteer with the town, once an e-mail is opened by a raymondmaine.org recipient, it is immediately deleted off the town’s server. There are hundreds of raymondmaine.org e-mail addresses currently being used in Raymond.

“The town doesn’t store e-mail in any central place. E-mail notes reside on the town’s mail server only until they’re collected by each individual recipient. In other words, when I receive my mail from raymondmaine.org, it is moved, not copied, from the town’s mail server to my personal computer and therefore no longer exists on the town’s server,” Forbes said.

According to Raymond Town Manager Don Willard, the deletion of e-mail is something town employees have been warned against. Willard said he has every e-mail he has ever sent or received since he started working in Raymond in 2000. That includes more than 250 from last year alone sent by Desjardins, which the Lakes Region Weekly obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“I have tens of thousands of e-mails. I mark them out by year,” said Willard, who also uses a town-provided Dell laptop computer similar to the one Desjardins was using. “The reason we keep all of them is because it’s state records management policy, which the town has been following. That’s the law.”

According to Maine Freedom of Information Coalition President Mal Leary, there is no doubt public officials are supposed to retain e-mail regarding town business.

“The state archivist sets a retention of public records schedule through rulemaking. Different documents must be retained for differing times,” Leary said.

Maine State Archivist David Cheever confirmed that state law requires municipal records, including e-mail correspondence, to be retained for at least two years.

“Depending on what the correspondence is, it goes up, not down. No matter what, two years is the minimum,” Cheever said.

Since Desjardins said he used his town-provided laptop for personal reasons, in addition to his town duties, Leary said he should have saved only those e-mails regarding town matters.

“E-mail used by officials to conduct official business is a public record,” Leary said. “The example I use is that an e-mail on a personal account from a selectman to the town manager asking about a budget issue is a public record, but an e-mail from his/her spouse about picking up a loaf of bread on the way home is not.”

Desjardins has not been charged with any violation of the law.