RICHMOND — Suppose Terry McAuliffe runs for president in 2020 and political operatives and reporters want to dig through official papers from the Democrat’s time as Virginia’s 72nd governor?
The library is still slogging through the papers of Virginia’s 70th governor, now-Sen. Tim Kaine (D), who was the commonwealth’s chief executive from 2006 to 2010.
The lag — which the library blames on staff cuts, an explosion of digital records and the time-consuming work of cataloguing material by subject matter — kept some Kaine administration papers out of view when he ran for vice president on the ticket with Hillary Clinton in 2016.
That would change under a bill sponsored by House Majority Leader C. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah). The legislation would require that all gubernatorial records be made public one year after the outgoing governor delivers them to the library. State law currently has no deadline.
“In the era of the internet and with technology being as advanced as it is today, Virginians are still being forced to wait 10 years to have access to official correspondence from past Governor’s administrations,” Gilbert said in a written statement announcing his bill. “When the Library of Virginia receives the correspondence, it should be put online and available without delay.”
The bill would require that all correspondence and other records from the administrations of Kaine, Robert F. McDonnell (R) and McAuliffe be made available online immediately.
“We owe it to taxpayers to operate a government as transparent as possible,” said Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Kirk Cox (R-Colonial Heights).
As Cox’s office announced Gilbert’s bill in a news release, it noted a Richmond Times-Dispatch article that revealed the backlog in March. If McAuliffe’s potential candidacy was also part of Gilbert’s inspiration, he wasn’t saying. The delegate did not respond to messages seeking comment. But Cox spokesman Parker Slaybaugh dismissed that notion.
“We know for Terry McAuliffe, everything is about Terry McAuliffe, but for us, this is just about good governance,” Slaybaugh said. “Since Tim Kaine was governor, Apple has released 16 versions of the iPhone, yet we are still waiting to read emails sent from his BlackBerry.”
McAuliffe served four years as governor and was prohibited by the state constitution from seeking back-to-back terms. He left office in January and has been publicly mulling a bid for president in recent months as he has campaigned for Democrats in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Kansas and Virginia.
A spokeswoman, Crystal Carson, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the bill.
As governors leave office, their administration’s records go to the state library, where they are catalogued and made available for public inspection.
The first step is to review records to exclude anything that cannot legally be disclosed, such as state homeland security information, procedures of the governor’s executive protection unit, proprietary business information related to economic development deals, or confidential details of legal settlements, State Librarian Sandra Treadway said.
“The day they leave office, they comply with the law, they turn things over to us, but they do not have the time to remove from what they give us anything that might be legally protected against public disclosure,” she said.
That review is not, however, aimed at redacting records that might be politically sensitive, Treadway said.
“We follow the law,” she said. “If something is not protected, it doesn’t matter how many warts are on there.”
The job of sorting and preserving records has grown bigger and more time-consuming with each administration, as more and more of each administration’s “papers” take digital form. That’s partly a matter of volume because conversations that used to happen in person or on the phone now take place in email chains that must be preserved. And partly, it’s the difference between how paper and electronic files get stored.
“When you process a paper collection, you buy some acid-free folders and put it on a shelf,” she said. Electronic files, by contrast, must be monitored and updated every time technology changes to ensure they can still be read.
The library expects to wrap up work on material from the Kaine administration, which included about 6 million electronic files, in about six months. Then it’s on to the McDonnell administration and its 7 million electronic files. Only after that will it turn to the McAuliffe team’s 8 million files.
Before the recession hit in 2008, the library had a staff of eight to process records, which includes all agencies in addition to the governor’s office and Cabinet. Amid the state budget crunch, staff was cut in half. Of the remaining four staffers, one works full time on processing gubernatorial records, and another works 40 percent of the time on that effort.
The library asked Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to include about $500,000 for seven additional staffers, four of them to process gubernatorial records. But the money was not included in the budget amendments he proposed to legislators Tuesday.
The announcement for Gilbert’s bill noted that the two-year state budget, which passed in May, included $600,000 for technology upgrades at the library intended to speed the process.
Treadway said technology alone cannot yet solve the problem, although the library has been working with researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, who are developing an artificial-intelligence tool meant to help.
