City officials discuss public access to emails

A computer that sat inside City Hall was a dream come true for reporters and armchair muckrakers alike, offering access to all incoming and outgoing emails from city commissioners and staff members.

Anyone with the time and inclination could head to the city Auditor and Clerk’s Office and essentially pore through the totality of any city employee’s inbox — until last summer, when the computer disappeared.

That disappearance has been a sore spot for some frequent critics of local officials. They argue a change to the email system has reduced the transparency of city government. City staff disputes that, stating the new setup is a simple consequence of a technology change.

Today, the public still has some access to emails from officials via an online portal on the city’s website. Those emails are limited to those sent by one of the officials the city calls the “big eight” — the five city commissioners, the city manager, the city attorney and the city auditor and clerk.

They’re further limited to emails that also include one of those officials as a recipient — so, say, an email from the mayor to the city attorney.

Other emails are still public records. If someone wants the entirety of an employee’s emails from a certain period — or emails in which a specific key word or phrase is used — they can submit a public records request and the city will produce the results.

But people such as Martin Hyde, a former City Commission candidate and a regular speaker at commission meetings, sees the change as a detriment to accessibility.

The ability to simply browse through city emails gave the public an easy opportunity to stumble upon things that were previously unknown. The new setup filters out most messages and forces people to offer specifics to find anything not available through the online portal, Hyde said.

“This is a clear choice, by a person or persons unknown at this time, to stop the public from seeing what’s going on at City Hall,” Hyde said at the April 16 commission meeting.

City spokeswoman Jan Thornburg offered up a less nefarious narrative behind the changes. When the city hired IT Director Herminio Rodriguez in 2014, one of his goals was implementing a more modern cloud-based email system to replace the aging program employees had been using. The switch to the cloud system took place last year.

The email service was not compatible with software that powered the public access computer at the Auditor and Clerk’s Office, Thornburg said. As a result, the city constructed a public access portal on its website.

It looked at the systems in place in nearby municipalities, particularly Sarasota County, and found most only offered a limited amount of emails from a select group of officials.

The city decided to build a new system based on that model. Although it’s a change from what was in place, Thornburg said the new setup was driven by practicality. Setting up remote access to all emails was deemed unfeasible.

She emphasized the city was complying with all legal standards, though she said the city did not consider expanding the scope of the new email portal.

“We’re making sure we’re keeping to a high standard of transparency,” Thornburg said.

Michael Barfield, president of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a legal consultant working with the group Citizens for Sunshine, was another frequent user of the City Hall computer. He acknowledged the city had no obligation to provide all its emails, but he bemoaned the computer’s loss as the erasure of an area in which the city was progressive.

“They call them public records for a reason,” he said. “They belong to the public, and they should be made readily accessible.”

Some city officials have expressed a desire to explore the topic. At an informal City Commission meeting Tuesday, Mayor Shelli Freeland Eddie asked staff to provide more information about the changes. She said she wanted the city to discuss possibly restoring the previous access.

Both Hyde and Barfield said they had no issue with using  the City Hall computer. The city repeatedly stated the new system is tied to nothing other than the move to a new email setup. Hyde and Barfield, though, suggested the changes also give the city an opportunity to better control the information publicly available.

“Say you request something — it’s reviewed before it’s released, they have a script going, they don’t get caught with their pants down,” Barfield said. “I think that’s what’s motivated this.”