Cotati City Council
Agenda Staff Report
Item type: CONSENT CALENDAR (ACTION)
To: City Council
Subject: ADOPT UPDATED RECORDS RETENTION SCHEDULE
Date: May 13, 2025
Written by: Kevin Patterson, Deputy City Clerk
Recommendation
It is recommended that the City Council approve a resolution to adopt an updated records retention schedule.
Background
The City last adopted a retention schedule in 2016. In the interest of increasing efficiency and ease of use, along with ensuring that recent State law changes are correctly applied to the retention of records, the City worked with Western Integrated Systems to provide a refresh to the City’s adopted retention schedule.
Analysis/Discussion
The retention schedule presented to the City Council updates the previous schedule with the most recent changes in Government Code, and modifies the format of the retention schedule to enable more efficient use when reviewing records and applying the correct retention. Over the years, Staff have identified that many of the record names in the previous retention schedule were disconnected from the names of records commonly used internally. This update aligns the names of the records to promote efficiency in identification. As the City embarks on a multi-year process to identify archived records currently in offsite storage, efficiency gains are critical to ensure a timely process.
Financial Considerations
The City has an interest in digitizing all records and also reducing the cost of offsite storage of historical records. Staff have been assessing the records stored offsite, and either identifying them as ”expired,” or digitizing them for ease of access, use, and preservation. By clarifying record types in the updated retention schedule, Staff will be able to more quickly identify records, speeding up the process of removing them from offsite storage, and realizing savings in storage costs.
Environmental Issues
This action is exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because it is not a project which has a potential for resulting in either a direct physical change in the environment, or a reasonably foreseeable indirect physical change in the environment, pursuant to CEQA Guideline section 15378.