Wilmington Star-News (7/8/09): "Trust us" is not a policy. It's an invitation to abuse the public's trust. ("Trust us, we're spending your money wisely." "Trust us, you don't need to know this." "Trust us, we wouldn't hide anything from you ...")
Yes, that’s the policy the city of Wilmington and some other local governments expect the taxpayers to accept. We should “trust” government employees to determine whether the e-mails they send are public or private.
As StarNews reporter Patrick Gannon discovered, such loose oversight leads to abuse and neglect of the state’s Public Records Law. City Attorney Tom Pollard and at least one department head admitted as much.
The StarNews requested a list of the subject lines of all the e-mails that were labeled private by 18 top city administrators. Among them, they had concealed 36,000 e-mails in a year.
City Manager Sterling Cheatham averaged 30 “private” messages per working day. Many of those likely had to do with personnel matters or other business that cities and counties can keep secret by law.
But Pollard acknowledged that often, this self-policing kept public information from the public. In effect, the city broke the law.
This separation of public and private e-mails stems from an opinion from the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a group that also advises governments. A faculty member/adviser told a group of municipal officials that it’s OK for government employees to shield their personal e-mails from the public.
In Wilmington, that means all a city employee has to do is mark the e-mail private and – voila! –
it’s no longer public record. Officials expect city residents to trust that every employee a) understands the Public Records Law b) complies with it faithfully and c) is never tempted to hide an e-mail that exposes a mistake, criticizes the handling of an issue, or leaves an inconvenient paper, uh, electronic trail.
There are legitimate exemptions for personnel matters, contract and land purchase negotiations and a variety of other sensitive issues. If it’s not explicitly exempt, however, the assumption is that the public can see it. The law makes no exemption for personal e-mails.
Furthermore, shielding so-called “personal” e-mails prevents residents from seeing how their employees spend their time. Given the nature of communication these days, it would be unreasonable to expect that employees never send a personal e-mail from a public account. But if they send and receive a lot of personal e-mails, the public has a right to ask why.
The correspondence may be personal, but the computers belong to the taxpayers. That makes it the public’s business.
Pollard says the city now realizes, after Gannon’s inquiry pointed out the glaring problem with the policy, that it must change the process for sorting e-mails.
Better still: Let the public see the “Honey, could you pick up a gallon of milk on the way home?” notes along with those outlining changes in plans for the convention center. And if it really can be kept secret under one of the myriad exemptions in the Public Records Law, that judgment should be made by someone other than the author or recipient of the e-mail.
Most reasonable people have a remarkable ability to tell the difference between a dashed-off memo to home and a document that relates to city business, and few are terribly interested in the Secret Life of the Government Paper-Pusher unless he or she is misusing tax dollars.
Trust us.