I Read Mayor Mike’s Email. You Can, Too!
by Steve-OBack in February, I got a burr in my saddle. Right after Mayor Mike decided to put the fix in on the Gas Drilling Task Force, stack the deck heavily in favor of the industry and keep any meaningful discussion about injection wells out the public eye, I got a little curious.
What’s going on here? How does the Mayor take an issue that the public is keenly interested in and completely cut the public out of the process?
So, on Feb. 26, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request with the City of Fort Worth to find out why. I asked the City to supply all emails between the Mayor and anyone affiliated with Chesapeake Energy between that day and Jan. 1, 2007. I also asked for email between the Mayor and any city department on the topic of injection wells over the same period.
I can’t possibly cover everything that I gleaned from the entire process in one post, so I’m just going to focus on the emails between the Mayor and Chesapeake Energy over that period.
My assumption going in to this process would be that there would be a heavy volume of email. After all, this is the same period of time when the Trinity Trees incident went down. I expected some interesting stuff.
And how many emails did I get between Mikey and Chesapeake mouthpiece Julie Wilson, CEO Aubrey McClendon or anyone else at Chesapeake Energy?
The answer: one email.
Really.
One email. Here it is:
Honestly, I wish I had friends who I only emailed once a year and ask to drop a grand or two on a going-away party for my pal, the outgoing city manager. Although I think Mikey is pretty squishy on ethics when it comes to his friends in the gas drilling community, I’ve heard Mikey hit up a lot of people from the Chamber of Commerce crowd with emails like this.
No, I’m much more troubled to think that in 14 months, I’m having a harder time believing that there was only one email exchange between Mayor Mike and Chesapeake. That’s why I asked a few people I know at City Hall about the City’s email policy, and they told me that there is a strict 100MB limit on city email boxes. “That doesn’t take long to fill up once you get a couple of PowerPoint presentations,” one person said.
When you get close to that limit? Delete. Delete. Delete.
So even though city code has very strict guidelines about destruction of city records, in practice, email is essentially exempt from the code. Apparently, everyone who works for the city is destroying public documents every day, and no one considers it that big a deal.
Were there more emails between Mikey and Chesapeake? No one will ever know. The fact is, according to the City of Fort Worth, Mike and Julie swapped one email over a 14-month period.
Maybe he and Julie exchange long, thoughtful missives written with quill and parchment like John and Abigail Adams. Maybe they sit on a park bench and exchange elaborately coded messages like something out of a John le Carre novel. Maybe they use the phone, semaphore or carrier pigeon.
I just think it’s curious that a very hands-on government official with a well-known love for the energy industry would only exchange one email in 14 months with the very visible spokesperson for the most high-profile energy company in the city.
What do you think? Leave a comment.
If you’d like to read an interesting take on email as a public document, take a look at this Dallas Morning News story. I’ve got more to write about. Stay tuned.
Tags: Chesapeake Energy, Mayor Moncrief
6 Comments, Comments or Pings
John Peter Smith
I doubt the city is hiding any emails from you. I think the answer is much simpler. The Mayor does all of his communication on controversial issues over the phone. There are two advantages. First, nosy ordinary citizens like you can’t file a request and read a phone conversation. Second, if disputes ever come up, it becomes a case of “He said, She said” since there is no paper or electronic trail.
As far as city employees deleting emails. Surely we can’t expect every city worker to save every Viagra ad or Nigerian banking email. There’s got to be a better solution than that.
Jun 16th, 2008
Steve-O
I agree with you on all counts, JPS. I do think that there is also a lot of room within the current structure for meaningful, relevant emails to go into the trashcan without much notice or consequence.
Jun 16th, 2008
Pete Wann
We certainly should expect every city worker to save every email that goes into and out of their mailbox. In fact, it’s so important that a competent IT department would take that decision out of the hands of the users and automatically store every email that goes into and out of the City’s mail servers, regardless of content. If I remember correctly, that’s the law in most places. If we expect publicly traded corporations to do it under the Sarbanes - Oxley Act, then why shouldn’t we expect the same thing of our public entities? (I also don’t see any exemption for email in the code. It’s not mentioned specifically, but I would think that email would fall under “electronic medium.”)
I think the answer is even simpler than either of you suggest — Like Dubya and his cronies in the White House, Mike is using a “non-official” email address for any communication that might come back to bite him in the ass. A more interesting FOIA request would ask for proxy server or firewall records for what IP addresses Mayor Mike regularly visits from his office computer. It’d be interesting to see how often MSN, AOL, Yahoo, or Gmail come up in those records.
Jun 16th, 2008
TXsharon
Steve-O, how dare you be so nosy! It’s not like the mayor is a paid employee of yours or anything. Oh, wait…
Jun 16th, 2008
Emmy
He wouldn’t have to access his office computer at all. He probably communicates via personal BlackBerry.
Even at the office, if an *official city* email needs to be sent it would probably originate from his assistant’s email address.
And you might not realize this, but sometimes members-only clubs have their own email system where members can email each other to chat about business matters, tee times, dinner reservations. Or so I’ve heard. (cough cough)
Jun 17th, 2008
dan
I work in the industry and I am also a Fort Worth resident. While I favor gas exploration, I as well find it hard to believe that one would not keep copies of any emails sent out. I know I never delete anything as I archive everything in folders, or keep hard copy files to CYA myself. I have a friend who works for a transit agency locally and he does the same thing as well. Mayor Mike reminds me of one of my kids who have this look of disbelief when you catch them doing something they should not be doing.
Jun 24th, 2008
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