From the Daily Camera (Boulder):  Despite concerns from the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Boulder City Council unanimously approved an ordinance Tuesday night that will allow the city to dispose of many records it now retains indefinitely.

City officials said the practice of maintaining almost all records forever has become incredibly burdensome. Records Manager Elesha Johnson described thousands of boxes in off-site storage that had not even been inventoried.

The ordinance brings the city into compliance with the state records retention schedule, which describes how long every kind of document must be kept.

But Barry Satlow, chairman of the Boulder County ACLU, said the passage of the ordinance on an emergency basis right after the voters gave the City Council the ability to meet in executive sessions is worrisome.

The executive session authority is restricted to legal matters and negotiating strategy related to the formation of a municipal energy utility and expires in 2017.

The closed meetings will be recorded, and the recordings could be released in response to a legal challenge to the legitimacy of the executive session or in response to a unanimous vote of the City Council.

However, the state records retention schedule allows recordings of executive sessions to be discarded after 90 days.

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