HOW WE GOT THE STORY
Journal-News investigative reporter Amanda Seitz contacted government officials throughout Butler County and requested local policies to uncover which governments allow public employees to send emails on private accounts. It’s part of the Journal-News’ commitment to watching your tax dollars and uncovering government waste and wrongdoing.
Few area governments dictate how public employees should use private emails for work business, leaving many public workers to decide for themselves if they send emails on their work or personal accounts.
Government employees who choose to send emails on private accounts sometimes avoid having the records automatically stored on a government server, which can make it harder for taxpayers to access the documents.
Local government leaders say they encourage all employees and elected officials to use public email accounts — for that precise reason — but nearly none of the major cities and townships in Butler County have written policies that actually direct employees to stay off their private emails for work.
In Middletown, for example, the city has no written policy on the issue, but Les Landen, the law director, said he advises employees and council members to use public email accounts.
“We push the issue really hard because it becomes a public records nightmare for the city. If you’re doing public business on your private system, it’s really hard for us to know what’s there,” Landen said. “If an employee says to me, ‘Yeah, I’ve been using my private email to send email for work.’ Yowza. That means I’m going to come and look at your private computer.”
Use of personal emails recently put Hillary Clinton, a likely presidential contender, in the spotlight — and not in a good way. Clinton said she used a private email address during her time as the Secretary of State and deleted 30,000 emails sent from that account during her four years in the office.
Critics of Clinton said she was able to pick which emails were considered public while she used private email on the job.
Use city email for city business
The Journal-News contacted government leaders from Butler County, the cities of Hamilton, Fairfield, Middletown and Oxford as well as West Chester and Liberty townships.
Only one, Hamilton, has a written policy that tells employees not to use their personal email accounts to send work-related emails.
“I think the standard is that everybody uses city-issued email,” said Tim Werdmann, the deputy city manager for Hamilton. “The assumption is that you use city email for city business.”
Hamilton’s policy, which says “city email users shall use only city information technology resources to send and receive email messages in the conduct of official city businesses,” also tells public workers not to automatically forward public emails to their personal accounts.
In West Chester and Liberty townships, employees are told to use public email accounts, but elected trustees sometimes use both personal and public emails to take care of township business. The same practice is true for commissioners elected to represent Butler County, said Charlie Young, the county administrator.
In West Chester, trustees are allowed to choose which email address is displayed on officials business cards and the township’s website, said township administrator Judi Boyko. Township Trustee Lee Wong said he has listed his personal email account as his primary contact for convenience. West Chester’s other two trustees list their public email accounts.
“I want quicker access to the people,” Wong said. He added that a firewall prevents him from accessing his township email from home or outside the township’s office. “It’s a big hassle.”
Wong said he typically forwards emails to the township administrator so she has the record.
In Middletown, Hamilton and Oxford, however, city email addresses are listed online for all council members.
Oxford council members are told to do work on the city emails during orientation, said Kim Newton, the assistant to the city manager. She said council members can easily access city emails from their smart phones or from home. The city hasn’t had to sift through someone’s private emails to track down a public record, Newton said.
“They know they’re to conduct (work) via city email,” Newton said. “They don’t want to do it privately. If they did it privately their private emails will be open to the public.”
The city stores emails for 15 years, she said.
Of the 174 disputes involving public records that the Ohio Attorney General’s office has mediated since 2013, only one involved public emails sent on a private account, spokesman Dan Tierney said.
‘I will not respond…’
No statewide policy addresses private email use, either. The Ohio Sunshine Manual — a public records guide book compiled annually by the attorney general — doesn’t broach the matter. The guide does, however, say government-related emails sent via a private email are considered public.
“This is just one of those digital-aged problems that raises issues,” said Dennis Hetzel, the president of the Ohio Newspaper Association and the Ohio Coalition for Open Government. “I would say it would behoove any governmental body to have clear policies on the use of personal devices for email.”
How the state’s elected officials use email differs, too.
Attorney General Mike DeWine, for example, relies on both personal and public email accounts for work, Tierney said.
“He has made any emails which conduct public business, regardless of account, available for public records requests as required by law,” Tierney said.
Same goes for Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, who announced last week he will also help to oversee public records disputes in across the state. A spokesman for the office said Yost copies any work-related emails sent to his private account on his state-issued account.
But when someone shoots an email to Gov. John Kasich on his personal email account, they get an automatic response from that states “if your message in any way pertains to State of Ohio business, I will not respond from this account” and asks writers to send government-related emails to a state account.
“The governor does not actually rely on email much, however, and prefers to communicate face-to-face or over the phone,” said spokesman Rob Nichols in a statement.
Staff writer Laura Bischoff contributed to this report.
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