Lantzville councillor finds his memory stick with civic info

Lantzville Coun. John Coulson has sworn off using a memory stick to store municipal information after finding his missing device.

Files on the recovered memory stick have now been wiped clean, he said on Friday.

Coulson reported it lost on June 7. On Thursday, he discovered the stick in a pocket of a laptop bag while unpacking it after a trip to Ontario.

The bag and the stick, which was not encrypted, travelled to Ontario and back with him.

Coulson is now using a portable hard-drive about the size of a large cellphone, which he figures will be easier to keep track of. “It is not as easy to misplace in a pocket.” The District of Lantzville issued a press release this week announcing that the stick holding four years of municipal information, including confidential material, had been lost and that the district was working with B.C.’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

The district announced that it will be formalizing procedures into a policy to protect information carried on mobile devices.

Lantzville has a population of 3,600 and is between Nanaimo and Parksville.

After misplacing the memory stick and spending a few days searching for it, Coulson reported it missing to the district.

Lantzville works on a paper-based system, he said. Information such as agendas for public meetings and in-camera agendas meetings are delivered to council members.

While Coulson keeps those paper copies at his house, “I’ve taken to scanning them and putting them in an electronic format because it is much easier to find and access stuff.”

In carrying out his duties as a councillor, Coulson said he frequently accesses electronic versions of past public and in-camera minutes, and municipal information on bylaws and policies as a way to be more proactive.

“So for me, it was a very convenient repository for essentially all things Lantzville and that’s why I have done this.”

Coulson said that it is not as though he had a staff member’s personnel file on the stick, but rather the information is related to his role as a councillor.

Another factor in the decision to use his own electronic device is that it can be difficult to find information on the District of Lantzville’s website, he said.