9 January 2017
Montana’s elected leaders and the emails they want to hide
Lee Newspapers state reporter Jayme Fraser has a crackerjack report on how Montana’s legislators and executive branch leaders use private email accounts to hide the public’s business from the public.
The practice is widespread among Democrats and Republicans, but especially beloved by Republicans, many of whom also share an indecent fondness for dark money.
[Former State Senate President Debbie] Barrett [R-Dillon] is among a group of legislators who have argued that few, if any, of their emails should be public record, regardless of whether it’s a personal or government account.
“The executive branch can make a decision every day on their own and it’s official business. It’s important people can see those records,” said Barrett, whose final term just ended. “For a legislator to have official business, that has to be in a committee or a place they can make a decision to affect their constituents. It’s not an official record what a constituent writes to you. I can talk to anybody, but I can’t make a decision on my own as a legislator. I have to take that to a committee or to the floor. That is the difference.”
Believe that and you will believe anything. Every vote that Barrett cast, or avoided, was a decision that she made on her own as a legislator. Every communication to or from a constituent on a government matter was a public record; neither Barrett nor the constituent had any expectation of privacy.
Senate Minority Leader Jon Sesso, D- Butte, disagreed [with Barrett].
“It seems pretty black and white,” he said. “Other than messages from your family or about hobbies with friends, it seems to me that everything else is public. If you’re talking to a constituent or a lobbyist, it should be public. I err on the side that everything’s public and go backward from there.”
The legal counsel and expert staff at the Legislative Service Division told legislators at a November training that some details remain unsettled, but the intent of the law and constitution is clear.
“Whether an email constitutes public information depends on the information, not the format or where it resides,” reads a new manual with email guidelines for legislators.
In my judgment, the law is clear: all communications, and that includes all emails, must be retained. The only reason Barrett, et al, argue otherwise is that they don’t want to be held accountable for things the public might consider unwise, unethical, or even illegal.
The technology red herring. Nor will I accept the argument that leaders and legislators are driven to private email by the state’s clumsy information technology architecture. I strongly suspect that those who most strongly want to hide email from the public are those who cast votes that ensure the state’s IT system is unfriendly.
The truth is that technology is not the problem. Fast, reliable, hardware, and virtually unlimited storage capacity, is cheap, and the convenience of GMail proves that good software already exists.
The real problems are a penchant for secrecy born of a desire to avoid accountability, and a lack of political will to do the right thing.
That’s the polite way of describing what some might call corruption.