Disclosure of Ann Arbor City Council e-mails creates transparency

It’s not the juiciest e-mail Greden ever sent. He and other council members routinely traded more gratuitous messages. They referred to colleagues as fools and morons. They mocked the public. They prattled on about personal matters.

If that were all this was about, it wouldn’t amount to much, beyond the public indignation that’s already been expressed and that contributed to Greden being voted out of office. But the real issue here isn’t the snarkiness. It’s the insidiousness with which council members sat in public meetings and used e-mails to secretly discuss issues behind the public’s back.

That’s what concerns us, and that’s why we participated in obtaining and making public the hundreds of e-mails that council members sent each other between November 2007 and April 2009. Our role was to pay for many of the documents to be digitized so they could be uploaded onto a citizen Web site.

These e-mails were obtained by a number of citizens filing individual requests under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. This effort was largely coordinated, and some of those involved may have had political motives. We are not interested in the politics of this. What we’re interested in is the transparency and accountability that can only be achieved by making these e-mails public.

We find it unacceptable that council members - while sitting in open session - were using e-mail to have conversations the public wasn’t privy to. Earlier this year, e-mails from the Feb. 17 council meeting became public, and showed that council members secretly traded messages about whether to postpone a vote on a proposed $50 million parking structure. Such behind-the-scenes discussions are an affront to the public, and contrary to the intent of the state Open Meetings Act.

Granted, of the e-mails made public so far, many involved conversations outside of meeting, and many show council being responsive to citizen concerns and gathering information to make policy decisions. That’s all well and good.

We also have not seen, in the e-mails we’ve reviewed so far, any other secret discussions during meetings as egregious as what occurred on Feb. 17, although we’re still going through e-mails, and citizens are too, thanks to the public database now available to them. Many more e-mails, dating back to January 2005, still are in the process of being posted on the public database.

Back in September, City Council approved new rules that ban members from exchanging e-mails with each other during meetings, with minor exceptions. But council members turned down a proposal to create a public database of all e-mails exchanged in the past. So citizens have stepped in to request past e-mails and make them available. That effort toward transparency has served the public interest.

Meanwhile, there’s a larger lesson here that we hope all public officials have learned. The intent of the state’s Open Meetings Act is that the public’s business should be conducted in public. When the gavel sounds and a public meeting is in session, it’s time to power down the laptops and cell phones and keep your deliberations out in the open. The public deserves no less - and will accept no less, as it has clearly demonstrated in this case. (This editorial was published in today's paper and reflects the opinion of the Editorial Board of AnnArbor.com.)