In Florida, retention is not a policy decision. The schedules are law, legal hold is law, and disposition has to be defensible to somebody who was not in the room when it happened.
The standards covered classification of what the estate held, the retention schedule each class fell under, the hold process that suspends disposition when litigation or a request is live, and the disposition path itself. They applied across three hundred-odd applications belonging to agencies that answered to different elected officers.
What made it hard is that one platform carried categories with incompatible instincts. Criminal justice information wants to be closed. Public records law wants disclosure by default. HIPAA wants a third thing again, and court records and elections data each carry their own statutory regime. A single retention standard has to be right for all of them at once, applied per class rather than per system, because a system that holds two classes of record does not get to pick the more convenient rule.
Defensible disposition is the part most estates skip. Keeping everything forever reads as caution and is actually the opposite: it converts every future request and every future breach into a larger one, and it is not what the schedule says to do.
Outcome
Retention, legal hold and disposition treated as statutory obligations with an owner, rather than as an internal policy nobody was accountable for.