June 19, 2017

Transparency is a key element of good governance.  Transparency means that “information should be provided in easily understandable forms and media; that it should be freely available and directly accessible to those who will be affected by governance policies and practices, as well as the outcomes resulting therefrom.”  (Source:  governancepro.com).  More simply stated, transparency means citizens can easily see inside their government to see how decisions are made.  This often means that our government makes its records available to citizens.  Georgia has an Open Records Act that provides rules that government entities must follow.  For example, citizens can make Open Records Requests (ORR) that generally must be fulfilled within three business days.

The ORR is the most often used method for accessing government documents.  The Milton Coalition has submitted a number of ORRs for emails related to various issues.  To our dismay, we have found that some Council Members sometimes use non-city (i.e., personal and business) e-mail for City business.  Let us be clear.  This is a violation of good governance practices.  Use of personal and business e-mail is non-transparent.  Why?  The reason is that city staff performs a search of the city’s server for a Council Member’s City e-mail when an ORR is submitted.  You are assured of a thorough and honest search by an objective professional.  However, when Council Members use personal and business e-mail accounts, the City requests that a Council Member search those e-mail accounts.  Staff must trust that a thorough and honest search is conducted by the Council Member; no independent verification is performed.

The Milton Coalition has checked with the Georgia Attorney General about the use of personal and business e-mail.  The use of such e-mail is not banned.  However, the reason for allowing personal and company e-mail is that many small municipalities in Georgia do not have servers or issue government e-mail accounts.  By necessity, city business must be conducted using personal or company e-mail accounts.  However, the Attorney General stated that in cases where a city has its own server and Council Members have city e-mail accounts, Council Members should not be using personal or business e-mail accounts, except under exceptional circumstances (e.g., the city server is inoperable).  Use of such accounts does not accord with good governance and encourages non-transparency (e.g., withholding/deletion of e-mails).

One Milton City Council Member, Karen Thurman, shifts seamlessly between city, personal, and business e-mail accounts.  Having long followed this practice means that many non-city entities (e.g., constituents, Non-Milton government officials) have unconsciously defaulted to using Ms. Thurman non-City e-mail addresses.  In so doing, it is likely that much of Ms. Thurman’s city government business never crosses our City server.  This means that a lot of City business is sitting on non-accessible, private (perhaps unsecured) servers rather than accessible, secured government servers.  This should make most reasonable citizens very uncomfortable.

The Milton Coalition requests that the City of Milton consider an ordinance that would ban the use of non-City e-mail accounts for conducting City business for all staff, City Council members, and anyone else that has been granted a city e-mail account.  It is time that the City start taking concrete steps to improve transparency.  Restrictions on the use of non-City email for conducting City business would be a good first step.

Tim Becker