Lynne Saxton, the former head of the Oregon Health Authority, resigned suddenly in 2017 after news of a plan to tarnish the reputation of a Portland health care provider became public.

Not surprisingly, the provider, FamilyCare Inc., sued the OHA. Saxton was deposed as part of the proceedings and admitted she had routinely destroyed text messages on her state-issued telephone.

That’s a problem, and not one limited to Saxton or the OHA, according to state Archivist Mary Beth Herkert.

But, Herkert adds, Saxon’s actions are only a tiny part of a statewide public records problem. Oregon and its various political subdivisions have mountains of public records, both paper and electronic. They’re poorly managed.

Herkert says think of the worst house you’ve ever seen on the television show “Hoarders, Buried Alive.”

For one thing, she says, most folks don’t understand that providers of cloud services and other storage systems don’t necessarily treat records the way they must be treated under Oregon law. Thus, when your space fills up, out go the old items to make way for new ones. As for text messages, telephone companies don’t save them, Herkert says. They may have records of when and to whom texts were sent, but that’s it. Once you delete texts from your telephone, Herkert says, they’re gone for good. Texts, like written letters, are subject to the state’s public records law.

Herkert, who for 30 years has been charged with storing and maintaining Oregon’s public records, is on something of a mission these days. She wants state agencies, cities, counties, even cemetery districts, to understand what the problem is and what they can do to address it. The first step, she says is learning that it isn’t really a storage issue so much as an electronic records management one, and there are ways to handle that.

In fact, Oregon has a statewide system for doing just that, and it’s available to all government agencies. They should take advantage of it.