“Former Mayor’s Lost Emails Found in Almere Archive, Exposing Poor Archiving Practices”

The municipality of Almere has found sixteen gigabytes of documents and e-mails from former mayor Weerwind (D66) in its archive. That happened after Broadcasting Flevoland had again asked the municipality to search for possible emails from Weerwind.

Initially, the municipality said that Weerwind hardly emailed during his term as mayor. In six years he would not have sent a single email and received only 191 emails. That turns out not to be true.

The municipality of Almere started looking again after the request from the regional broadcaster and came across a mailbox with a size of sixteen gigabytes. The municipality cannot say exactly how many documents are involved.

Municipalities and governments are obliged to archive documents as e-mails. It is not the first time that the municipality of Almere archives the mailboxes poorly. In the past, mailboxes of departed aldermen and senior officials have been completely deleted, Omroep Flevoland reports. The municipality is therefore under the supervision of the province. In 2021, King’s Commissioner Leen Verbeek called the archive of the municipality of Almere ‘a mess’.