If you want to see all of the emails your mayor received and sent during the week of March 16-20, 2020, to find communications regarding the coronavirus outbreak, all you have to do is ask. Under state law, the mayor is required to retain these and provide them on request. If you want to see the emails that flowed between a given school district and a former superintendent regarding a school-siting controversy from several years ago, again, these are supposed to be preserved and provided. But if you ask your state senator or representative for something as simple as a copy of his or her schedule from, say, yesterday, you have no guarantee. If you even get a response, one of the lawmakerâs aides could say, âSorry, we deleted it at the end of the day. We have no record of it.â