The Town Council agreed last week to make available to the public five months of emails town councilors wrote to each other and to create a new policy aimed at greater transparency.
Citing an effort to make town governance more transparent to residents and to curtail any “conducting” of town business in private, council Vice Chair Mallory Cook asked the council at the March 10 meeting to make those emails public.
“It has been approximately four months since this council was seated in November, and during that time, I have become increasingly concerned about the growing amount of council business that is being conducted via email,” Cook said in a memo she wrote and read at the meeting.
The council received “multiple” reminders from the town manager, council Chair John James, the town attorney and Cook about not conducting business through email, Cook said. The pattern has continued, leading her to present her memo and to propose that the council take up the issue at the March 24 meeting, she said.
The council voted 5-0 to discuss a new email policy at the next meeting.
Cook, who has served on the council for nine years, wrote that the usual “best practice” of the council has been that emails deal only with logistics such as scheduling, with “substantive discussions and deliberations occurring during public meetings, where they belong.”
She proposed making public any email communication, involving any of the five councilors, in which “substantive council business occurred” since the seating of the new council in November.
She began the process by flagging such online conversations and so far had come up with 95 pages of emails that will be submitted to the public record for the March 24 meeting., she said.
Cook further suggested to the council that all councilors’ email communications, excluding any related to confidential or personnel matters, be formally submitted to the public record “as is the case for public comment.”
In a phone conversation after the meeting, Cook said a new council inevitably brings changes and she doesn’t feel there has been any ill-intention or untoward behavior by council members.
“Evolution is necessary, we need to grow and acknowledge that we have a new council,” she said. “I just want to be sure that we are holding ourselves accountable to be transparent in all ways.”
While councilors may learn things or develop questions in the two weeks between meetings, citizens should be brought along in the process, she said at the meeting. This may slow the process, she acknowledged, but for town government to be transparent these conversations need to happen in public.
Councilor Sam Flinkstrom said during the meeting that while the Freedom of Access Act allows for emails to be requested, “I understand the intention in getting this out there without being asked (for them). I appreciate that.”
Flinkstrom suggested creating an additional email inbox for all councilor email correspondence that would act as a public record.
Following the vote, Town Manager Tim Pellerin informed the councilors he had received a FOAA request for all their emails going back to November. The State of Maine Freedom of Access Act, or FOAA, allows any person to inspect or copy public records from state or local government agencies.
Reached by text, Cook said she had not known about that request and it was not connected to her memo.
Pellerin said he will work with each councilor on how to provide the information. He hoped to get it done within about a month, he added, but the town budget and other town work are of highest priority now. The state’s FOAA law requires records to be produced in a “reasonable time,” which varies based on the request’s complexity.
“I don’t think this is an earth-shattering thing,” Pellerin said. “It happens from time to time. This isn’t the first time it’s happened in towns I’ve been in. People want to see what’s going on, it’s fine.”
