However, a majority of the group expressed concern about creating a system that archived all government e-mails automatically.
Instead, they supported allowing state employees to decide which e-mails should be preserved.
Though news reports of the administration's public information officers -- and even Easley himself -- deleting public records triggered the panel's creation, several of those the governor appointed to review the matter said state employees should be trusted to do the right thing.
The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer and eight other N.C. news organizations sued Easley last month over his administration's "systematic deletion, destruction or concealment of e-mail messages sent from or received by the Governor's Office."
The state's Public Records Law makes no distinction between electronic records such as e-mail and other types of documents. The goal: for the public to know what the officials who represent them do with their authority and with the public's tax dollars.
"None of us wants to be the headline that says `Miscreant Employee Deletes E-Mails,' " said panel member Mac McCarley, Charlotte's city attorney. "There may be some folks who haven't recently had training and don't know where that line is, at least there's the accusation in a lawsuit that some people knew where the line was and violated it, but it strikes me the situation we're in today can be fixed with better training."
Among the things McCarley said might be burdensome to state employees, however, is a requirement they complete a proposed public records training program, which would take less than an hour of time online.
A draft proposal circulated Thursday would leave it to the heads of state agencies to decide which employees under their supervision would be required to complete the training.
Media representatives, including Observer Editor Rick Thames, have urged the use of off-the-shelf digital archiving systems that could preserve all e-mails sent or received by employees.
Other states and many large corporations already use such systems. After an e-mail deletion scandal involving the staff of Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt, that state launched a $2 million program to archive all employee e-mails for a minimum of seven years.
Creating such a system in North Carolina would cost at least $1 million a year, an official said.
Members of the e-mail committee opposed instituting such a system here, saying it would capture e-mails that would not qualify as public records -- such as spam or personal messages.
"I'm concerned that if you save everything, you can't find anything," said Ned Cline, a retired newspaper editor from Greensboro. Cline said employees would just start picking up the phone or "meet in men's rooms" rather than send e-mails that could then be requested by the public.
Thames said he wouldn't object to deleting messages that clearly aren't public records, but pointed out that requiring employees to sift and categorize e-mails every day would be far more expensive than just saving everything and then sorting it when a specific public records request is made.
Steve Riley, a senior editor at The News & Observer, provided the panel a copy of a May 2001 e-mail exchange between Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps and her administrative assistant to illustrate why some in the media are skeptical of assurances public employees almost always follow the law.
Phipps, later convicted of accepting bribes and sent to federal prison, described how she had spent her morning, listening to "oldies" and deleting e-mail.
"I've been deleting the trash box and the sent box," Phipps wrote. "Took forever because you can delete the trash box at one swoop, but apparently you have delete each `Sent' item. Just think it's a good Joe Neff measure."
Neff is an investigative reporter for The News & Observer.
The exchange was retrieved through a public records request only because the state employee with which Phipps was corresponding forgot to delete it from her sent e-mail folder.
