Public access to government e-mail

By Rebecca Mahoney

Orlando Sentinel

Today, most public officials communicate by e-mail.

But Central Florida residents and reporters who want to view those e-mails often face complicated and expensive obstacles, including technology barriers, delays in getting access, or bills for hundreds of dollars, a new Orlando Sentinel study has found.

From Osceola, where residents have to write a check simply to view e-mails, to Volusia, where the only free way to read messages is to sit at an employee's work station while he looks over your shoulder, most county governments across Central Florida are unwilling or unable to efficiently meet public requests to view e-mail.

Only two governments in the seven-county region offered a quick and free response: Brevard, which simply forwards e-mails along; and Orange, which has a public terminal set up in the county administration office in Orlando that allows members of the public to view the e-mail of 21 top officials.

The Sentinel's findings alarmed open government advocates.

“E-mail is really the critical checkpoint for the public to stay in touch with what kind of business is being done with your tax dollars,” said Joe Adams, author of The Florida Public Records Handbook. “It's very important that the public have easy access to those e-mails.”

The Sentinel requested a week's worth of e-mails from each Central Florida county's commission chair and manager. The study was part of this week's Sunshine Week, when Florida newspapers highlight the importance of “Government-in-the-Sunshine” laws.

Results were mixed.

Brevard County was the most responsive. An administrator in the county manager's office forwarded 27 e-mails, plus attachments, to a Sentinel inbox within 40 minutes.

The worst was Volusia County. The request was met with several options, each one expensive or frustrating: pay 5 cents per page plus labor costs to compile 290 e-mails and wait while they're printed; or pay $10.56 for a CD that provides copies of the e-mails but does not list them in any order and does not work on every computer.

Alternatively, residents may view the e-mails for free, but must first pass several intimidating barriers: Make an appointment with a member of the county's technology department, be escorted through a dizzying maze of cubicles to his work station; and scroll through e-mails one at a time while he sits at your elbow. The system searches only one month at a time, and can take up to four minutes to find just one e-mail.

“That makes me tired just thinking about it,” said Adria Harper, director of the First Amendment Foundation in Tallahassee. “They practically have to turn over their first-born child. They [residents] will never want to request a public record again after that.”

On Friday, a day after the Sentinel informed him that Volusia had the region’s least-accessible e-mail, county Spokesman Dave Byron said he plans to examine how other governments make e-mail accessible, will consider installing a public terminal to make viewing e-mail easier and less intimidating, and will consider revising the fees associated with records requests for e-mails.

He said much of the problem stems from the county's computer system, which he said wasn't designed to deal with the 55,000 or more e-mails that jam county inboxes every day. Buying a new system would cost at least $250,000, he said, but he pledged to find out if there are improvements that can be made to make it easier to access e-mail.

“There's no intent to hassle anyone. This is a very, very open government,” he said. “But that doesn't mean our system can't be improved to make it less intimidating or to make getting e-mails less cumbersome.”

Lake and Seminole counties will copy e-mails to a disk or print copies of e-mails for a fee, and charge for the disks or printing costs as well as labor costs. However, neither county charges up front and Lake county officials are willing to mail records to a home or office. Seminole County is also in the process of setting up a public terminal so residents can view e-mail for free.

In Polk, officials set up a computer in the technology department so reporters can view e-mail for the five county commissioners and the county manager. But it's unclear if the terminal is also readily available to the public. Several calls to Polk's technology director and the public information office were not returned last week.

In Osceola, the only option is to pay to have the e-mails printed out — a method Harper said may violate state open-records laws.

“There shouldn't be a fee charged just so someone can inspect the records,” she said.

Without the ability to review officials' e-mail, the public would never have known that private companies routinely wine and dine elected Volusia county officials during private meetings; that Polk residents were readying a recall campaign against four county commissioners in 2005; that Polk Commissioner Randy Wilkinson sent religious e-mails to government employees; and that former DeLand City Commissioner Maureen France despised her job – and her colleagues.

“I'm so glad I only ran for a 2-year term. One more year of hell and I'll be free,” she wrote in 2003 while using her city e-mail account.

There is no state standard for how local governments should handle e-mail, and technology isn't sophisticated enough to allow complex searches of archived e-mails, said Harper.

That means if a resident wants to search for an open-ended topic — one that will require a county employee to spend hours searching e-mail archives and compiling e-mails — the bill could be staggering, she said.

In Volusia, that kind of request led to one resident getting an estimate for $14,000 for a public records request a few years ago, said Byron. He did not recall what the resident was looking for.

“Local governments are just starting to realize that many people are requesting e-mails in this format and eventually they're going to have to come up with some kind of uniform policy,” Harper said.

Still, at least one Florida government appears to be ahead of the curve. Jacksonville allows residents and reporters to view e-mails on their own computers simply by logging onto the city's Web site. The program was not difficult to design and was less expensive than using staff members to search for and assemble e-mails, said Misty Skipper, a press secretary for Mayor John Peyton.

“We were spending a lot of money filling public records requests for e-mails,” she said. “We decided this was the most efficient way for everybody.”

Rebecca Mahoney can be reached at rmahoney@orlandosentinel.com or 386-851-7914.

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