9/10/09
Government officials in Rio Arriba County who try to keep their e-mail correspondence private may want to reconsider.
The city of Las Vegas had wanted to withhold some of its e-mails, but it lost that battle last month when it agreed to release more than 100 messages sent on private accounts between Mayor Tony Marquez and a quorum of the city council, New Mexico Foundation for Open Government Executive Director Sarah Welsh wrote in a Sept. 2 press release.
The city had refused a March request from the Las Vegas Optic newspaper to inspect those e-mails, arguing they were not public records because they were sent from personal accounts. The state Attorney General sided with the Optic and told the city to hand over the records, the release states.
Because the e-mails discuss public business, they are public records, no matter from which account they were sent, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Lowe wrote in a July 31 letter to the Optic, the release states.
The city still maintains the e-mails are private, but said it would “voluntarily” release them, Welsh wrote in the press release.
“I think it’s clear that these are public records,” Welsh said. “However, because the law hasn’t been updated to reflect the digital age, there is some room for confusion and, in some cases, obstruction. Some bodies are looking for guidance as to how they should maintain (electronic records) and the law isn’t giving them that.”
The state Inspection of Public Records Act makes all government documents public unless they’re protected by about a dozen specific exceptions. That applies to records in any format, regardless whether they are stored on paper, on tapes or on a computer. But the Act was last updated in 1993, before the Internet was widely used, and it does not specifically outline how e-mails and other electronic records should treated.
The Attorney General sided with the SUN in 2005 in a similar dispute over e-mails with Rio Arriba County. The County had refused to provide e-mails then-commissioner Andrew Chavez had sent and received from his work e-mail at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It had also withheld County Manager Lorenzo Valdez’s emails, arguing all of them were “preliminary” and didn’t count as records.
The Attorney General told the County to immediately release both men’s e-mails unless they were specifically made confidential by an exception in the law.
The SUN is currently fighting multiple e-mail-related public records disputes.
Northern refused in July to release e-mails between its Board of Regents and former president Jose Griego. Northern argued that because individual regents do not represent the Board’s opinion as a whole, their e-mails are not public records.
Mesa Vista Superintendent Robert Archuleta has refused to provide his resignation letter and his correspondence with the School Board, citing an exception in the Act meant to protect employee confidentiality.