FILE IT IN CIRCULAR….
BC- …FAN MAIL FROM SOME FLOUNDER?….DELEGATED TO DELETE!…
Sentinel part 1 & 2….
‘Fort Lauderdale – If you’re one of the many who e-mailed the city’s Planning & Zoning Board with thoughts on the Bahia Mar redevelopment, consider yourself deleted.
Board member Fred Stresau said he doesn’t want your e-mails, and he deleted them without reading them. Next time you e-mail him, you’ll get a reply saying your e-mail will be deleted, “unread and unwanted,” he said Monday.
Stresau complained that he got more than 100 e-mails from the public about the Bahia Mar condo-marina-hotel complex a developer hopes to build on city land at the beach. The Planning & Zoning Board was scheduled to vote on it July 15, but postponed it.
“I’ll tell you what,” Stresau said that night, “I don’t need to hear from all these people that were here tonight, to have my e-mail clogged up because the city gave my e-mail address out.”
Assistant City Attorney Sharon Miller advised Stresau that if his private e-mail address is in city records, it’s a public record “now and forever.”
“Then I’ll change my e-mail address,” he responded. “This is absolutely ridiculous!”‘
‘Fort Lauderdale City Attorney issued a legal opinion yesterday in the unwanted-emails controversy.
City attorney Harry Stewart was asked to give a legal opinion about whether an advisory board member can legally delete emails from the public that arrive in a private email account and are unread. That’s what Stresau said he did with emails from city residents about the Bahia Mar redevelopment.
Stewart said there is a “dearth of legal precedent” on this topic, and that “until determined otherwise by a court of competent jurisdiction,” he advises that deleting without reading is OK. (The same would apparently apply to tossing mail into the garbage unread, or returning FedEx packages to the developer, unopened, like board member Pete Witschen said he did.)
Stewart went on to say in his memo that if the emails are read, the advisory board member should announce at the public hearing “the receipt of an ex parte communication” and present it to the city, in the same way that board members announce conversations they had with the developer or others involved in the case, before they vote.
Note: If public officials delete your emails without reading them, they are still retained in the city computer system.
This whole to-do will be resolved, city officials say, by giving advisory board members email addresses at “fortlauderdale.gov.”’
full text link below…………
