Right to know contrasted
BY TOM KEARNEY
So, here’s the deal: The city attorney, a man, oversees a consultant, a woman, who’s been hired to help rewrite the zoning laws.
The lawyer approves her consultancy contract, signs her pay vouchers, and supervises her work. She makes a lot more money as a consultant than she would as a city employee. The project doesn’t go well; it’s past deadline and over budget. The lawyer and the consultant develop a close personal relationship.
At the same time, the city’s interim administrator — she works with the committee that oversees the city attorney contract — also develops a close personal relationship with the lawyer.
The details of these relationships, and their built-in conflicts of interest, are all told in hundreds of e-mails the three people sent back and forth, using their city government e-mail accounts. The e-mails are stored on the city government’s servers.
All this happened in Burlington, Vt.
The Burlington Free Press wanted to know what was in those e-mails, and what they said about how the city government was functioning.
The city stonewalled. Some e-mails involved labor negotiations, it said; others fell under the lawyer-client privilege. Still others, the city said, were “purely personal,” and outside the scope of the newspaper’s request.
The newspaper sued. In a ruling dated Oct. 3, Judge Brian Grearson ruled in Washington Superior Court that the newspaper was right, but will get none of the e-mails.
The ruling hinges on a balance of competing interests, and Judge Grearson leans more heavily toward privacy than other courts have done.
The decision says all the things journalists want to hear about the people’s right to know. The judge rejects the city’s argument that purely personal e-mails are not public records; he acknowledges there is high public interest in conflicts of interest that would affect the functioning...
