Your right to know: No private email accounts for public business

By Tom Kamenick

Imagine that a developer has been lobbying your local town board to approve a controversial development. You file a record request asking for all emails between that developer and the board’s three members.

None of them have official government email accounts, so they search their personal emails.

Two members each turn over more than 15 emails. The third says she never sent nor received any emails from the developer. Do you believe her? What can you do about it if you don’t?

Shockingly, in Wisconsin it’s perfectly legal for government officials to use their personal emails to do government work. Even though a government entity may have no ability to access personal accounts and even though it’s ridiculously easy to use personal emails to hide conversations from the public, these practices are still allowed.

Yes, as anybody familiar with the Open Records Law knows, personal email accounts are still subject to the…

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