How long are meeting minutes kept? Can they ever be destroyed?

[Guest Roxanne]

I’m the secretary of a political club. We are wanting to save storage and would like to destroy meeting records.  How many years should we keep?

[jstackpo]

Forever.

If you have a lack-of-storage problem that you can attribute largely to the minutes, I'll bet you are putting far too much into those minutes -- see RONR, page 468ff, for the minimum essential content of minutes: "what was done, not what was said".  The rest is dross.

[Guest Zev]

If I had this problem I would scan the minutes into text format and save it on a DVD. If we assume that a page could hold 10,000 characters and one DVD is 4.7 gigabytes, then one single DVD could hold upwards of 481 million pages of data.

[jstackpo]

3 minutes ago, Guest Zev said:

 1 DVD = 481 million pages of data.

Yeah, but it is a political organization.  Probably not enough.

[George Mervosh]

5 hours ago, jstackpo said:

Forever.

If you have a lack-of-storage problem that you can attribute largely to the minutes, I'll bet you are putting far too much into those minutes -- see RONR, page 468ff, for the minimum essential content of minutes: "what was done, not what was said".  The rest is dross.

Does the book actually say forever?  Oh and I suppose you don't have any issues keeping all 481 million pages in substantial books or binders in your basement, right? 

[jstackpo]

12 minutes ago, George Mervosh said:

Does the book actually say forever?

P. 475, line 30: "even many years later".   That's pretty close to "forever" for a lot of organizations.

[Chris Harrison]

Since they are a record of the business transacted by the organization I would think they would need to be kept for all eternity.  Like me wanting to read a copy of the Washington Post from the day I was born a member may want to read the minutes from the day of the organization's birth.

[Newbie]

Geez. Even tax records don't have to be kept that long!

7 hours ago, jstackpo said:

Yeah, but it is a political organization.  Probably not enough.

🤣 😉

From our State Statute: " An electronic or paper copy of all meeting minutes shall be available to the unit owners for at least 3 years after the date of the meeting."

Edited October 3, 2019 at 07:37 PM by Newbie
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