Dear Editor:
RE: Town official ‘unable to confirm’ records were destroyed; cites ‘miscommunication,’ May 16.
The Town of Erin is stating they cannot confirm whether or not severance records were destroyed as records were not found, although given the three-year retention period it is possible they would have been destroyed.
Under the Law Society Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers are generally required to retain documents for 15 years. Isn’t an easy solution to this conundrum of the vanishing records a simple phone call by the town to their legal counsel to find out how many settlements the town entered into with employees from 2012-2017?
Certainly the Town would not have engaged in settlement discussions without the benefit of legal counsel. And even taking this hare-brained idea one step further, couldn’t the town just ask that counsel to provide them with the sum total of settlement packages for that period and share that information with the taxpayers? Voila, transparency and accountability in local government restored.
Joanna Mullen,
Hillsburgh