From the Wilmington Star-News (7/7/09): During the past year, 18 top Wilmington officials sent or received more than 36,000 e-mails marked as “private” and shielded from public view.
The “private” e-mails, according to information provided by the city at the request of the StarNews, included exchanges between city employees about important issues, such as the annexation of Monkey Junction and the Wilmington Convention Center. City employees also discussed more mundane issues in private, such as the moving of office equipment and interviews with media outlets.
Confronted with the information Tuesday, several city officials acknowledged that the city needs to do a better job of ensuring that public information sent via e-mail doesn’t get withheld from the public.
“I must admit we need to improve the management of e-mails,” City Attorney Tom Pollard said. “Obviously we get a lot of them, and it’s a matter of making sure we’re managing them properly.”
In late June, the StarNews requested information from the city about “private” or “personal” e-mails, including the number of such e-mails sent or received from each city employee.
Pollard responded last week, sending a spreadsheet with the subject lines of thousands of “private” e-mails sent or received by 18 city employees, including department heads and city council members.
According to the spreadsheet, City Manager Sterling Cheatham sent or received more than 8,600 messages – about 30 per work day – that didn’t get forwarded to the city’s public e-mail server for public consumption. A computer in the city’s Public Information Office allows the public to see e-mails sent and received from city accounts unless they are deemed “private” by the city employees. Under city policy, to keep an e-mail private, a city employee needs only to write “private” in the subject line of the e-mail.
Finance Director Debra Mack sent or received 7,480 private e-mails. City Clerk Penelope Spicer-Sidbury, Budget Director Scott Townsend and Community Services Director Steve Harrell all sent or received nearly 3,000 such e-mails, according to city records.
“I think that, on its face, the material we’ve been furnished raises many serious questions,” said Mark Prak, a Raleigh-based attorney for the StarNews.
Prak said he believes either city employees are using public resources – their city e-mail accounts – for private purposes or marking messages that should be public by law as “private” because they don’t want the public to know the information in the e-mail.
“I just think they’ve got some explaining to do,” Prak said.
Pollard acknowledged that some e-mails he saw marked “private” shouldn’t have been, but that he didn’t think there was any “malicious intent” by city employees to keep information from the public.
According to state law, most city government business is required to be done in public, including e-mails sent and received from city e-mail accounts. Exceptions include most personnel records, trade secrets of private companies, certain information regarding the potential expansion or location of businesses, certain communications from city attorneys to the city and some law enforcement records related to criminal investigations.
City spokeswoman Malissa Talbert said Tuesday that Pollard recently reminded city employees about what types of information are protected under the law.
“It’s just something we have to continually be educated on and reminded of what’s appropriate and what’s not,” Talbert said. “I do know that we are in the process of looking at our system again to see what we can do to improve it. …Obviously, we need to do more.”
Talbert said screening e-mails is often a “balancing act” between what must be protected under law – such as personnel records – and the public’s right to understand what’s going on in city government.
Pollard said employees know that they could be charged criminally if they release protected personnel information.
“Because of that, I think people become very cautious,” he said.
Ashley Perkinson, an attorney with the N.C. Press Association, took issue with the city’s policy of allowing individual employees to mark e-mails as private.
“I do not think that is an acceptable policy under the public records law,” she said.
City officials said Tuesday they couldn’t immediately determine how many total e-mails – public and private – were sent from each employee’s account.
Cheatham estimated he sends and receives as many as 100,000 e-mails a year, and that he deals with countless personnel issues, which are protected by law. Due to that volume of e-mails, he acknowledged he’s not “absolute” in his ability to comply with the city’s guidelines regarding what should be public and what should be private.
“It’s obvious that when you have that volume of e-mails that certain e-mails will get mis-screened,” he said.
Mack, the finance director, said Tuesday that she communicates with family members via her city e-mail account and marks those private. She also acknowledged that she has marked messages as private that shouldn’t have been, such as an exchange with other city employees about the moving of office furniture and an e-mail about an on-camera interview request with a TV station.
“That one shouldn’t be private,” she said.
Mack said the 7,000-plus private e-mails sent or received from her account in a year is a small percentage of her total e-mails, which she also estimated at 100,000. She said she didn’t believe the number she kept private was a “unreasonable number.”
“It’s near nothing if you look at the volume (of e-mails) I get,” she said.
She also said her job as finance director involves many aspects of government that are exempted under public records laws, such as personnel issues, potential economic development opportunities and land-purchase and contract negotiations.
Mack said she could get into trouble for failing to mark “private” on e-mails that should be kept private, such as personnel matters.
“My biggest concern is not having ‘private’ on something that should have had it on there,” Mack said.
Prak said the city’s system of allowing government employees to mark their own e-mails allows them too much room to manipulate the information that gets out to the public. The nearly 9,000 private e-mails sent by the city manager in the past year, he said, needs “some serious, close evaluation.”
“The notion that there’s that much that’s private at the local government level is canard,” Prak said. “It’s crazy.”
Pollard said the city would consider ways to make sure e-mails are properly designated, such as reviewing individuals’ messages periodically or assigning an employee to monitor the private e-mails.
by Patrick Gannon, Star-News Staff Reporter